This week, ancient Japanese paper art on the nanoscale.

I was told I could graduate when I could create a graphene crane.

And I have not yet hit that point, but they allowed me to graduate anyway.

So someday.

And scientists are building tiny versions of our organs.

That's not as complex as the original organ, but certainly it retains a lot of the features.

Plus how mitochondria power our muscles. This is the Nature podcast for July the 30th, 2015.

I'm Kerry Smith. And I'm Adam Levy.

By now you probably know that graphene is a pretty miraculous material.

The thinnest substance in existence, stronger than steel, and a super-fast conductor of electricity.

Graphene has these talents because it's two-dimensional, a one-at-atom-thick sheet.

But sheets are boring, so a group at Cornell University in New York State have figured out a way

to use graphene to make tiny 3D structures and machines. They used kirogami, the ancient

Japanese art of paper cutting. They've sliced and diced graphene

to create hinges, stretchy transistors, and springs, the simple building blocks of mini-machines.

What therefore, anybody's guess? Reporter Lizzie Gibney spoke to Cornell University

scientist and artist Melina Bliss. Melina explained how her project began.

So it really originally came from playing with large sheets of graphene that had been

released off of the surface and lifted up into water where we could really poke at it and develop

a physical intuition for how it behaves as a material.

So kind of as an artist would take a sheet of tissue paper or a sheet

of construction paper and start to think that, you know, she could do different things from those

...