Pollen Folds Like Origami
Tuesday, April 20, 2010 - 07:07
in Physics & Chemistry
For those of us with allergies, springtime pollen is an invisible nuisance. But under the high-powered microscopes of Eleni Katifori, a biophysicist at Rockefeller University in New York, the grains of plant material become bits of origami -- they delicately fold, bend and roll themselves up to plug up leaks as they travel from flower to flower.