MIT engineers created the “buckliball,” a hollow, spherical object made of soft rubber containing no moving parts, but fashioned with 24 carefully spaced dimples. When the air is sucked out of a buckliball with a syringe, the thin ligaments forming columns between lateral dimples collapse. This is the engineering equivalent of applying equal load on all beams in a structure simultaneously to induce buckling, a phenomenon first studied by mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1757.

The buckliball not only opens avenues for the design of foldable structures over a wide range of length scales, but may also be used as a building block for creating new materials with unusual properties, capable of dramatic contraction in all directions.

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