Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 16 hours ago

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Termite mounds are remarkable structures that regulate temperature, balance airflow and maintain structural stability in some of Earth’s harshest climates. And like other irregular, disordered systems, they can be difficult to replicate with modern engineering techniques.

Now, researchers at Princeton’s engineering school have developed a system for designers to mimic irregular natural structures like termite mounds or human bones — not only their microstructural patterns, but their mechanical properties as well.

“We created a theory that is applicable to two distinct physical systems,” said Glaucio Paulino, the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering at Princeton. “Knowing one such system can help to understand the other one better.”

In an article published March 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers explain how they developed the method by combining two disciplines: origami, which studies how surfaces fold along creases; and tensegrity, which explores structures held together by compression and tension. Origami is commonly used to create objects that fold into compact shapes and expand to deploy in tasks such as space exploration. Tensegrity describes structures like the human skeleton, which holds its shape through a balanced distribution of stress among hard bones and soft tissues.

By exploring the mathematics that govern origami and tensegrity, the researchers learned that the systems’ underlying math rules are essentially the same. Although not obvious to non-mathematicians, the formula governing origami’s precise folds can be translated into the rules that govern tensegrity’s force distribution.

“It turns out that the same equation describes both engineering structures, origami and tensegrity,” said Xiangxin Dang, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and the article’s first author. “These two different types of structures are connected by math.”

Regular shapes, such as a cube or a sphere, are easy to design because they can be described by a small number of variables, Dang said. But irregular shapes, such as a termite mound or a complex section of bone, can demand many such variables to describe such disordered systems. This can make some designs impractical because these variables form large systems of equations demanding extensive analysis.