Live like a Sea Cucumber

I know what you're thinking:

Why would I want to?

Well, actually, you might not want to LIVE like one, but you might want to use the sea cucumber's house-building techniques. Their method is rather like erecting a tent and then freezing it, making it non-flexible. What's even better is that they can de-solidize it, too. Sure would make moving easier, right? It's all done with nanofibers forming a sort of web of segments connected rather like the segments of a carpenter's rule.

sea cucumber's house

Right now, scientists are using their understanding of the technique to try to figure a way to make tiny little brain implants that are not rigid and thus more compatible with brain tissue. But it could be upscaled, right? Just a matter of a few orders of magnitude, right?

I know who they should call upon to help them understand the sea cucumber's methods. I ran across him just yesterday via a link to an archived article in one of my favorite blogs,

Fashion Incubator

, which is about everything you need to know to set up and run your own fashion business but sometimes ranges as far afield as my own interests.

He's a mathematician whose specialty is wrinkling, crinkling, really intricate origami-type structures, and carpenter's rule-like constructions. I kid you not. He's one of those boffins (That's the word the English have for the folks in your class who break the curve. Isn't it great?) who got a Ph.D. at 20, immediately became MIT's youngest professor ever, and got a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2003. His name is

Erik Demaine

Keep reading all three pages of that link and you'll read that he's presently using what he knows about these things to understand and possibly predict protein folding and, since he's interested in architecture, to figure out how to build a building around an internal carpenter's rule structure.

So, if those professors in the first link were to get together with Dr. Demaine, a whole new transportable architecure might be the result....

Which would be a great thing for all those folks who live near the seaside in this age of global warming and super storms as is happening in the UK, where I am, today.