November 1, 2025
Snap, crackle, morph!
'Chinese lantern' structure shifts into many shapes for various applications
Shape-shifting lantern snaps like a fidget toy — commenters divided
TLDR: A magnet-controlled polymer “lantern” snaps into many shapes for tasks like gentle gripping and fluid control. The community split into robotics/medical hype vs “just a fancy lamp” skepticism, with side drama over the name and a flood of Magneto/IKEA memes, underscoring real potential and real debate.
NC State researchers dropped a polymer “Chinese lantern” that can snap into more than a dozen swoopy 3D shapes, and the internet instantly turned it into a vibe check. The lantern stores energy when you compress it, then snap! it flips states in a heartbeat. Add a thin magnetic film and you can twist or compress it remotely like a sci‑fi prop, unlocking demos from a gentle fish gripper to a water valve and a compact tube-unlocker. The team even published a model to “program” the shape and power (paper).
Cue the comments: engineers are hyped for soft robots and medical stents, while skeptics yell “fancy lab fidget toy” until it unclogs their sink. The fish gripper sparked an ethics mini-war (“noninvasive” vs “leave the fish alone”), and the “Chinese lantern” name ignited a cultural debate—some say descriptive, others say lazy branding. Meme-lords christened it “Magneto’s IKEA lamp” and posted clips of lamps going “brrr.” DIYers want open-source cut patterns; clinicians are asking for heat-safe, body-friendly materials; and safety nerds worry magnets near pacemakers, which fans clap back to with “that’s the point: remote control.” It’s equal parts breakthrough and comment-section circus—and everyone’s snapping to their corners.
Key Points
- •NC State researchers created a polymer Chinese lantern meta-unit that snaps among multiple 3D shapes via compression or twisting.
- •The lantern is inherently bistable (lantern and spinning-top states), storing and releasing elastic energy during snap-through.
- •Variations produced by twisting and folding yield multistable configurations, including one with four stable states.
- •A thin magnetic film enables remote actuation with a magnetic field, demonstrated in a fish gripper, water filter, and tube-opening device.
- •A mathematical model maps geometry to shape, stability, and energy, allowing programmable design; work published in Nature Materials (2025).