In short
Why paper folds so well, and why creases are hard to undo; includes how paper is made and how different papers affect origami performance.
Guests and backgrounds
Dr Stephen Mann, paper chemist and teacher; trustee at Frogmore Paper Mill (historic mill with early paper machine). Toshiko Kurata, origami teacher. Bill Sampson, professor of materials at the University of Manchester studying disordered materials including paper. Tomohiro Tachi, professor at the University of Tokyo researching origami and geometry.
Key claims
Paper’s “memory” comes from hydrogen bonding between cellulose fibres; creasing irreversibly breaks some hydrogen bonds and fibres. Folding ease depends on fibre packing, bonding density, and “formation” disorder. Washed/craft papers fold more smoothly than tightly bonded tracing paper.
Notable examples
origami crane and movable flapping crane; napkin vs paper comparison; tracing paper becoming opaque and unforgiving; washi (mulberry) vs kami (beginner paper); microscopic fibre tearing; Tachi’s one-sheet life-size origami bunny and Miura-ori deployable folds used for compacting solar panels.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOPaper Folding Introduction
0:30 to 1:12
Hosts discuss the art of origami and the significance of paper folding.
“PNC Bank brings you Call of the Wild Money Moves.”
Listener's Question: Paper Folding
1:12 to 2:25
Discussing a listener's question about why paper folds well.
“Corner to corner, ensuring the edges align precisely.”
The Nature of Paper
2:25 to 3:48
Exploration of paper's unique properties and why it's suited for folding.
“My question for cloud science is why is paper folding irreversible or why does paper fold so well?”
The Paper Making Process
3:48 to 10:36
A detailed explanation of how paper is made and its structural properties.
“I'm going to try and find the answer to the question.”
Irreversibility of Paper Folding
11:40 to 11:52
Explaining why creases in paper are permanent.
“If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts or spending time on month end close, it's time to get Brex AF, a gentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts.”
Finding the Right Paper for Origami
11:59 to 13:58
Discussion on different types of paper suitable for origami.
“This is CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that explores your science questions.”
Creating Movable Origami Cranes
14:03 to 16:40
Learn how paper choices affect the mobility and aesthetics of origami cranes.
“And always better to make a very sharp crease.”
Understanding Paper Physics
16:40 to 19:19
Explore the properties of different types of paper and their impact on folding.
“I'm a professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester and I study disordered materials, one of which is paper.”
Analyzing the Structure of Origami Paper
19:19 to 22:28
Discover how the microscopic structure of origami paper contributes to its folding capabilities.
“So this is a piece of origami paper that's been printed, and let's see if we can just get a little bit of a focus on that.”
Advanced Origami and Engineering Applications
22:28 to 26:44
Learn about the intersection of origami and engineering, including real-world applications.
“I mean, if I saw that in the distance, I might think it is a real rabbit or bunny.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Carol:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
0:30Carol:at Whole Foods Market. PNC Bank brings you Call of the Wild Money Moves. Shh, listen. Hey, guys. That's the sound of a multi-level marketing pitch. This is life-changing, you guys. Sounds like she wants you to buy lots of essential oils. They are so essential. And then have all your friends buy essential oils. Are you more of a geranium or lavender fan? Don't look her in the eyes. Guard against Wild Money Moves with PNC Bank. Brilliantly boring since 1865.
1:03Dr Steven Mann:We'll start by creating the structural creases. So place your paper with the colour side down. Colour side down, OK. You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show inspired by your curiosity. For the paper diagonally. And sometimes by your skills. Corner to corner, ensuring the edges align precisely. Crowd science listener Harika is helping me make an origami crane over a video call from Tokyo, Japan. A paper crane is a symbol of longevity and healthy life. So it's special and iconic to us. Origami is a Japanese word that literally translates to paper folding. So the paper should naturally follow the creases you made.
1:51Dr Steven Mann:And this is my first attempt at it. i'm struggling just why do you want to go the other way go this way the bottom side of the kite should be lifted oh no to the top i have bad news my kite doesn't have any flaps so i think i'm going to do the whole thing the wrong way around then yeah Oh no. Okay, so I'm going to keep working on my crane. In the meantime, I should ask you about your question. My question for cloud science is why is paper folding irreversible or why does paper fold so well? And what made you think of this question? Were you doing origami and it came to you? Yeah, well, paper folding origami is a familiar part of our culture.
2:43Dr Steven Mann:And I once spent nearly a year living in Bath in the UK. And one of my colleagues kindly invited me to join his family for Christmas dinner. And the question came to me while I was helping decorate the table with cloth napkins and tried folding napkins into cranes. Oh my gosh, was that really hard? Much harder than I had expected. it with paper you can make sharp precise creases and carefully align edges and corners right but with cloth that's much more difficult given i can't do it in paper i can't imagine how i would fare with a napkin so did you manage it did you end up with a paper well a napkin crane yes i will say i managed it but my napkin cranes were i hope charming but not exactly elegant So I think paper is obviously the best material for paper folding, right?
3:42Dr Steven Mann:Yeah, it's almost like the paper has a memory that other materials don't have. Yes. Okay, well, I'm going to practice my origami. I'm going to try and find the answer to the question. Let's see which happens first. My money is on finding the scientific answer for learning how to make a paper crane, but we can see. Thank you. Thank you, Harika, for your question. Paper is so perfect for folding that it's the basis of an entire art form. But why does paper remember its creases in a way that, say, a cotton napkin doesn't? First, I think we need to find out exactly what paper is. I know it usually comes from trees, but how can a knobbly old pine make a crisp white sheet?
4:30Carol:So we make the stuff in the beater and then we pump it into here, into this chest.
4:36Dr Steven Mann:To me it sort of looks like fermented milk, kind of like cottage cheese. It's like white and lumpy. We're being shown around this very noisy paper making operation by Dr Stephen Mann. He's a paper chemist, paper making teacher and a trustee here at Frogmore Paper Mill.
4:54Carol:And this is the place where the world's first paper machine was commercially run and built around 1803.
5:01Dr Steven Mann:And so this is a historic paper mill. How different is it from a modern one? Is the process of making paper the same?
5:09Carol:The process is the same. You know, paper was invented by Cylon 105 AD.
5:15Dr Steven Mann:Cylon was a Chinese court official, credited with inventing paper about 2 ,000 years ago.
5:20Carol:He's known as the father of papermaking purely because he was the guy who actually wrote down the methodology for making paper.
5:28Dr Steven Mann:So could you talk me through the process of how paper is made?
5:32Carol:The vast majority of paper is made from trees. So you select the right type of tree and the first thing you do is to so-called pulp the tree, which is reduce it to individual fibres. You then throw it into water to disperse the fibres and then put it through a process where you mechanically work on the fibres. You essentially bash them.
5:53Dr Steven Mann:And here at the mill, we can see this bashing in action. So the pulp is moving really quickly. And then where's it getting squashed? The bars on the roller interact with the bars on the bed plate
6:05Carol:and the fibres get squashed in between.
6:08Dr Steven Mann:Whatever the raw material, it could be pulp from a tree or in this case mostly recycled materials, you need to break down the fibres to prepare them for their future life as a sheet of paper.
6:19Carol:The fibres get stretched, they get compressed, they get bent and they get twisted. And all those actions damage the inside of the fibre and that makes it more flexible.
6:33Dr Steven Mann:Once the fibres have been bashed, or to use the technical term, refined, this watery gloop is ready for the next step.
6:42Carol:So the fibre's come up onto this continuously moving plastic mesh where the water drains through.
6:50Dr Steven Mann:It's like a conveyor belt, a sieve conveyor belt.
6:53Carol:Yeah, it's a sieve conveyor belt. You see it's nice and shiny because there's lots of water. The water content's slowly reducing. When you get to this point here that we call the dry line and then you've got your sheet of paper that's now 20 % fibre
7:08Dr Steven Mann:80 water that's interesting because it still it kind of looks like just very wet yeah paper right but it's only 20 fiber that's right and then passing under a roll and that roll is just squashing water out and it's you know it's strong enough to hold itself together it's sort of at the end of the conveyor belt it's coming off and sort of holding its own um but someone here is oh he's torn a sheet off it's like very damp paper but it's not totally falling apart The sheet torn off by the papermaker is very recognisably paper, even though at this point it's still about 60 % water. Most modern paper would now be dried further with heated rollers, but this particular type of paper is torn off and air-dried.
7:55Dr Steven Mann:But regardless of the method, once the paper is dry, for some reason it doesn't then just fall apart back into fibres. Why?
8:05Carol:This is where the chemistry comes in, and it's the difference between something like a cotton napkin and a cotton piece of paper. So with a cotton napkin, you've actually got tremendously long threads of cotton, and you physically weave them together, so they're just mechanically held together. With paper, you've got these individual fibres, and if you look at the structure they made from cellulose, and cellulose is just a long chain of glucose molecules. We all know glucose is just a common everyday sugar. And glucose contains a particular chemical group called the hydroxyl group, an OH group.
8:43Carol:And OH groups actually act like little magnets.
8:46Dr Steven Mann:So that's an oxygen atom and a hydrogen atom, which are bonded together.
8:49Carol:That's right.
8:50Dr Steven Mann:And one's a bit more positive and one's a bit more negative?
8:53Carol:On the OH group, the oxygen is negative, the hydrogen is positive. And you've got two different fibres now, each with an OH group. then the oxygen on one fibre will be attracted to the hydrogen on the other fibre. Yes. And the hydrogen on that will be attracted to the oxygen. And that's a phenomenon that we call hydrogen bonding. And without hydrogen bonding we'd all be lumps of jelly on the floor.
9:17Dr Steven Mann:And paper would be lumps of jelly on the floor as well.
9:19Carol:You wouldn't have a sheet of paper.
9:21Dr Steven Mann:So this bonding between an OH on one fibre and an OH on another fibre is crucial. They're kind of sticking together.
9:28Carol:And nature makes the OH groups when it makes the glucose molecules. And the paper maker gets the OH groups on one fibre as close as he can to the OH groups on another fibre so that the bonding can happen.
9:42Dr Steven Mann:The paper making process of refining the fibres, then squashing them together, allows lots of sticky hydrogen bonds to form. And those hydrogen bonds are partly why paper folds so perfectly.
9:54Carol:If you think about the sheets of paper, you've got the fibres themselves and you've got the fibre-fibre bonding. If you put a crease in the paper, what you're actually doing is you are destroying some of those hydrogen bonds and they've gone forever. And you can never undo that damage. And the other thing you do is you damage the fibres. Some fibres you will break, some fibres you will partly break and some fibres you won't break. So for that reason, once you've creased a piece of paper, you can't really un-crease it.
10:30Dr Steven Mann:So the only way to get rid of the crease would be to sort of pull it all apart into fibres again and put it back through the mill?
10:35Carol:Yeah, and start again, yeah.
10:38Dr Steven Mann:So that's the simple answer to listener Harrika's question. Paper folding is irreversible because it permanently breaks some hydrogen bonds, as well as some of the fibres themselves. but importantly not all of them which is why it folds like a hinge rather than breaking in two. Now not all paper folds equally. For example it's easier to put a sharp crease in printer paper than in say a paper napkin. Why is that and what's the best paper for origami? That's what we're looking at next.
Read the full transcript
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11:59Dr Steven Mann:This is CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that explores your science questions. This week, we're looking for answers to listener Harika's question. Why is paper so good for folding? Haruka patiently tried to teach me origami at the start of the show and I promised her that I'd practice. But I think I need professional help.
12:24Carol:For the beginner, the basic origami paper is called kami.
12:28Dr Steven Mann:It's handy to control. This is origami teacher Toshiko Kurata. I'm hoping that an in-person instructor might help me master the paper crane. But first, Toshiko is introducing me to an array of papers in front of us.
12:45Carol:We have the craft paper, which is more like heavier and is stronger.
12:51Dr Steven Mann:Yes. Keep nice shape. You've got some tracing paper in front of you. Is tracing paper any good for making origami?
12:58Carol:Yes, but don't make a mistake.
13:02Dr Steven Mann:It's an unforgiving paper. So it remembers every crease. So if you get it wrong, it's game over. Yeah, I think so. Any other papers we should touch on?
13:10Carol:Of course. Washi paper, please. Okay. So washi paper is a Japanese paper. It's usually handmade. Got some gorgeous patterns. Yes, very beautiful design. And this is made from the mulberry. Also maybe causal. So different type of the tree. You can see the... I can see the fiber. Fibres, yeah. Yeah, so like made for long, long natural plant fibre. Feel like cloth-like. Yes, it feels a bit cloth-like.
13:41Dr Steven Mann:Yeah, and it's softer. So we've got washi in front of us, we've got kami in front of us. What would be best for making a paper crane?
13:49Carol:So, all kind of paper I'm able to make.
13:52Dr Steven Mann:Here we go again. Time to make the most of paper's handy hydrogen bonds.
13:57Carol:Please face up to the colour side and try to make the triangle, please.
14:02Dr Steven Mann:We're making movable cranes, and for this, Toshiko chooses the washi paper and recommends that as a beginner, I use kami paper.
14:12Carol:And always better to make a very sharp crease.
14:15Dr Steven Mann:OK, really press down on it. While constructing my crane, it becomes clear how much origami relies on paper's memory for past folds. As you fold and unfold the sheet, you use previous creases as a visual guideline for where to fold next. Follow the creases. My folds haven't been precise enough. I've got a bit of bunching going on there. I'll sort of squash it out. Beautiful. Very nice. Really? Yes. Thank you. With Toshiko right next to me, I'm blossoming into an average student.
14:49Carol:Woohoo! Done! So now we have like the top have two triangles, but that's going to be wings. they're going to be moved
14:59Dr Steven Mann:and then
15:01Carol:that to the end
15:03Dr Steven Mann:the question is is it moving or not moving cute look I've made a crane so just to describe what our cranes look like they've got nice big wings like an aeroplane cute little heads that kind of point down a nice tall tail pointing up okay so should we try and move them Yes. Make the wings flap?
15:26Carol:So pull back.
15:28Dr Steven Mann:Wow!
15:29Carol:As I pull the tail, the wings are flapping. And that is a movable version of an origami crane. It's so cool! Yes.
15:37Dr Steven Mann:This is where the difference between the two types of paper we used, washi and kami, really becomes clear. Mine looks more like quite jerky, whereas yours is more smooth.
15:48Carol:I think it would be more like forced to move.
15:52Dr Steven Mann:Less free? Yeah. Can I try flap your crane?
15:55Carol:You will see.
15:57Dr Steven Mann:Ah, yeah, it's much smoother. It's also, it's less resistant. Like, I have to apply less force to make it flap. Yeah, this one, I kind of feel fleely to fly away. My crane looks pretty good, even if I do say so myself. Its flapping motion is a bit stiff, but I love it all the same. So why is washi paper perfect for a smooth flap? Why is cami paper ideal for beginners? And why is tracing paper, paper you can see through, so unforgiving? We're heading to Manchester in the UK to meet a professor of paper physics, who I'm hoping can solve our paper puzzles.
16:39Carol:My name is Bill Sampson. I'm a professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester and I study disordered materials, one of which is paper.
16:48Dr Steven Mann:What's a disordered material?
16:50Carol:OK, something like paper is very much formed by random processes. The fibres are very, very much disordered in the plane. And thus, if you hold a piece of paper up to the light, you can see it's sort of cloudy.
17:00Dr Steven Mann:And there are sort of clearer patches. Right.
17:04Carol:That's the thing that papermakers call formation. And that's the disorder. And if you make paper from different kinds of fibres, the size of that disorder changes. And then things that you can do in the papermaking process can change the amount of disorder that you get in there.
17:17Dr Steven Mann:When we saw the fibre pulp being bashed about in the paper mill, it was actually very controlled damage. How much the fibres are refined at that stage determines the type of paper you end up with. Basically, more refining lets the fibres pack together more tightly, meaning more bonds between the fibres and a denser sheet. While less refining means the fibres form fewer bonds and end up with more space around them.
17:42Carol:The reason why the kind of papers that are easy to fold are easy to fold is because you've got the right amount of bonding. So you've got distance between the fibres. So there's a bit of room for things to move inside the structure. So as you bend to make a full fold, then fibres on the outside are going to be pulled and fibres on the inside are going to be squashed. And fibres in the middle are going to get something in between, depending on where they are as you move through the direction of the sheet.
18:04Dr Steven Mann:What kind of scale are we talking about here? Because I'm kind of picturing long fibres stretched over the fold, but are they smaller than that?
18:12Carol:I mean, the fibres depend on the vegetable matter from which the fibre has come. Let's say you're typically starting from a fibre that started its life in a tree. Then you're dealing with things that are a couple of millimetres long and about 30 microns wide if they come from softwood fibre. So that's narrower than the human hair and just a couple of millimetres long. That's tiny. Yeah, and if you're dealing with hardwood fibre, they're shorter and they're narrower. So they may be only 10 microns wide. But it'll be different for different kinds of paper.
18:37Dr Steven Mann:So we've got lots of different kinds of paper in front of us on the table. We've got some origami paper. We've got tracing paper. And when I fold tracing paper, I mean, it really is unforgiving, isn't it? That fold is basically stuck there.
18:54Carol:Yeah, but it's also very beautiful because you can see that that tracing paper is now, where you folded it, it's gone a bit more opaque.
19:00Dr Steven Mann:Yes, it has.
19:01Carol:And that's because you've broken some bonds between fibres.
19:03Dr Steven Mann:The fibres in tracing paper are about as densely packed and strongly bonded as you can get. And when you fold it, many bonds break, so it's easily damaged, making it a risky material for origami amateurs. But what about paper especially designed for origami?
19:21Carol:So this is a piece of origami paper that's been printed, and let's see if we can just get a little bit of a focus on that.
19:28Dr Steven Mann:We're looking at a piece of origami paper under a microscope.
19:31Carol:The best thing we can do to look at the fibres is actually tear this piece of paper. Done. so let's do that and see if we can get that underneath there and there you can start to see
19:42Dr Steven Mann:it's so hairy there you go so you can see those fibers so those ones they're a couple of
19:48Carol:millimeters long they're about 20 30 microns wide and you can see that where i ripped the sheet it's gone through layers and that's because paper has a layered structure this origami paper i did a few calculations it's about eight fibers thick and that layered structure is one of the reasons why it folds so nicely is because the fibers are lying on top of each other and therefore they can bend over each other and buckle into the spaces, into those voids between the fibres.
20:08Dr Steven Mann:Could we have a go at folding it and seeing what a fold looks like?
20:11Carol:What I'm going to do is I'm going to fold it and then I'm going to score it with my fingernail. Now, if I get that under the microscope, you can see the line.
20:18Dr Steven Mann:Very clear fold under the microscope. There's sort of a dark line.
20:22Carol:And if you look along there, I did manage to find some fibres that were just starting to come out of the surface along the crease. There you go, yeah. You can just see there's some that's just starting to poke out a little bit. Now, I did some calculations about this kind of paper last night, and one centimetre of this paper would have about 3 ,000 fibres crossing it. So we're just breaking the odd one here or there. So it's unsurprising that the odd one is breaking.
20:45Dr Steven Mann:Right, exactly.
20:45Carol:But it's an example of this. You've got this kind of damage that's happening in there, but it's very, very few.
20:50Dr Steven Mann:It's time to bring out the cranes Toshiku and I made earlier. Why do they behave so differently from each other? We've made some paper cranes, one out of cami paper. they flap and one out of washi paper and I think you can kind of hear that the washi the washi one flaps more smoothly why is it smoother to flap?
21:15Carol:I suspect it's a slightly lower density I think it may have slightly longer fibres as well.
21:19Dr Steven Mann:The fibres in this washi paper are less densely packed than in the cami paper but the difference is also down to where the fibres come from in the first place.
21:29Carol:I would expect that the washi paper would probably include some mulberry fibres. Mulberry bark fibres very long. Harder fibre is only going to be a couple of millimetres long whereas the mulberry fibre can be centimetres long.
21:40Dr Steven Mann:Centimetres long.
21:41Carol:So your number of fibres in the sheet becomes fewer. They're very well bonded along their length because you can have a lot of bonds along two centimetre fibres more than you can get on a one millimetre fibre. So that I think would give you some nice flexibility to the sheet but it just has a very nice feel to it and that will come from the fibres that are in the sheet. You can hear that it's softer.
22:00Dr Steven Mann:You seem very familiar with these cranes. Are you an origami?
22:05Carol:I'm not a current practitioner but I've made many thousands of these cranes in my time.
22:09Dr Steven Mann:Thousands? Really? For fun?
22:12Carol:Yeah yeah yeah absolutely.
22:14Dr Steven Mann:Very impressive. I can see how easy it is to get swept up in origami. Since making my first crane with Toshiko, I've already taught my partner and my sister this satisfying skill. And our final guest takes paper folding to the next level.
22:31Carol:So this is origami bunny that I made.
22:36Dr Steven Mann:Oh my gosh, it's so detailed. I mean, if I saw that in the distance, I might think it is a real rabbit or bunny.
22:42Carol:So this is made from one sheet of paper.
22:44Dr Steven Mann:This is Tomohiro Tachi. He's a professor at the University of Tokyo and researches origami and geometry. Over a video call, he's showing me a life-size, lifelike bunny that he folded from one piece of paper, with a little help from his invention, the origamizer.
23:03Carol:So this 3D form is designed in the computer.
23:06Dr Steven Mann:This bunny is amazing. The way the ears are a little bit narrower at the base of the head, and then they go out a bit and come in. I mean, it's so impressive. And on the surface, there are these little triangles.
23:20Carol:Yeah, so this three-dimensional form is made of small triangles. So that's how you model 3D models in computer graphics. And the algorithm is computing some origami folding between these triangles to make it foldable from one sheet of paper to that given shape. For that, I used some compression geometry techniques to design this. I designed the software to do so because I thought I cannot make it by myself to arrange all of these triangles. You have to compute all of the creases all at once.
23:59Dr Steven Mann:Okay, clever. So you can put the information into your software about what you want to make and the software can kind of spit out a solution in a way. This is how you could do that.
24:09Carol:Yes, that's right.
24:11Dr Steven Mann:So does a machine do the folding for you?
24:13Carol:So the computer tells you the crease pattern where you fold, but you have to fold by your hands.
24:19Dr Steven Mann:Amazing. How long did it take you?
24:21Carol:So this took me 10 hours or so to fold from one piece of paper.
24:27Dr Steven Mann:Oh my gosh. This software can create a folding pattern for any 3D object, though you still need a lot of skill and patience to fold the structure itself. Professor Tachi also researches other styles of folding. Next, he shows me a famous abstract style of origami.
24:44Carol:This is it.
24:45Dr Steven Mann:Oh, wow. Okay.
24:46Carol:This is the mirari. That's so cool. So this is called mirari. It's a sheet of paper folded along the patterns of parallelograms.
24:56Dr Steven Mann:Parallelograms are basically tilted over rectangles.
24:59Carol:That can fold to a very compact state and then deploy in both directions.
25:06Dr Steven Mann:It's how if you wanted to carry some paper around with you in your pocket and not scrumple it up. That's the kind of fold you need to do, although I imagine it probably takes a while. Together, the folded parallelograms make a series of mountains and valleys, which beautifully collapse into each other to make a flat sheet if you apply some force. A bit of force in the opposite direction and the mountains and valleys return.
25:30Carol:So this has been used for folding the map. You can just open it very quickly. If you pull it in one direction, it pulls out in other directions. Every fold line is synchronised and that's very useful for deployable structures. This has been once used for folding solar panels in outer space mission.
25:56Dr Steven Mann:That's so clever. Okay, so it's a way of making them compact and able to expand without damaging them. Is paper often kind of a useful starter or practice material for more complex designs, like say solar panels, which obviously can't be made out of paper?
26:16Carol:Yes, so these geometries can be applied to more advanced engineering applications, but to come up with these patterns we use papers as the first prototyping material.
26:28Dr Steven Mann:Professor Tachi has developed variations on the Miura Ori fold for high-tech applications which could use all kinds of different materials. But the simple fact that paper lends itself so well to folding helps make this all possible.
26:43Carol:Folding a sheet of paper is a good tool for my research in particular to come up with some new idea. and then share some idea with others. So fold together with my students, I can find some new research topic. And I enjoy folding with my family.
27:05Dr Steven Mann:Oh, that's so nice.
27:06Carol:That's my hobby part of origami.
27:10Dr Steven Mann:Origami generates ideas that go beyond paper. The folding patterns can be used for solar panels, tiny medical devices, even emergency shelters. But at a much simpler level, there's a lot to be said for the pure joy of folding, as I discovered for myself when learning to make a crane. And for that, I thank Papers Fibres, its hydrogen bonds, and listener Haruka for her question. Over to you for the credits. That's all for this episode of Crowd Science from the BBC World Service. The question was from me, Haruka, in Japan. The presenter was Caroline Steele and the producer was Cathy Edwards. If you have a question you'd like the team to unfold, please email crowdscience at bbc.co.uk.
28:01Dr Steven Mann:Thanks for listening. Mata ne! Thanks Haruka. And don't forget, you can also send your questions to us on WhatsApp. Just message us or send a voice note to plus44-8000-314-773. Bye!
28:19Carol:How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khaled, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways
28:33Dr Steven Mann:the U.S. has shaped the modern world.
28:35Carol:And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 250. Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
29:14Carol:Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now or search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
From the publisher
CrowdScience listener Haruka has been making origami cranes out of paper since she was a child. Creating one out of a cloth napkin, however, was a next-level challenge. It gave her a new appreciation of paper’s excellent foldability, and made her wonder: what is it about paper’s structure that means it remembers its creases? We set out to unfold her question as we peer into paper’s secrets. First stop: Frogmore, the world’s first mechanised paper mill. Here, Dr Steven Mann is on hand to explain the papermaking process, the chemistry of paper, and why that makes for a foldable sheet.
Host Caroline Steel tries to make a paper crane, assisted by both listener Haruka and origami teacher Toshiko Kurata, who also introduces us to an array of paper types. Each type folds differently, and, with the help of a trusty microscope, Professor Bill Sampson from the University of Manchester reveals why.
Finally, we see just how complex paper folding can get, meeting Professor Tomohiro Tachi from the University of Tokyo, and his invention, The Origamizer. Presenter: Caroline Steel
Producer: Cathy Edwards
Editor: Ben Motley
(Photo: Toshiko Kurata and Caroline Steel with origami creations - Credit:BBC)