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Software lets researchers create tiny rounded objects out of DNA. Here’s why that’s cool

Marvel at the tiny nanoscale structures emerging from research labs at Duke University and Arizona State University, and it’s easy to imagine you’re browsing a catalog of the world’s smallest pottery.

A new paper reveals some of the teams’ creations: itty-bitty vases, bowls, and hollow spheres, one hidden inside the other, like housewares for a Russian nesting doll.

But instead of making them from wood or clay, the researchers designed these objects out of threadlike molecules of DNA, bent and folded into complex three-dimensional objects with nanometer precision.