Honoring the Cultivation of Knowledge and Inter-generational Connection
- 936 -technologies
- Jul 13
- 2 min read
Yesterday, was a birthday for many around the globe: for us, at 936-Technologies, we appreciated the birth of Buckminster Fuller.
Recently, Eric spent time with the Design Science Studio and its regen·era community, an art-and-design collective built around the ideas supported by Buckminster Fuller.
Fuller spent his life looking to nature for design. He found that you can enclose the most space with the least material using one particular shape (an icsohedron) and he built it at the scale of buildings: the geodesic dome.
That is the geometry behind BioBlocks: Self-Assembler, as well.
One geometry, three scales. Fuller's geodesic dome can span about 100 meters. The carbon molecule named in his honor, buckminsterfullerene (the "buckyball"), is about 1 nanometer, a hundred-billionth of that size.
And, the protein shells that viruses and bacteria build to carry their cargo sit near that same tiny end, roughly 200 nanometers across. All three iterate on the same icosahedral geometry: the pattern in common soccer balls.
In 1962, biologists Caspar and Klug worked out how viruses are built by studying Fuller's domes directly. Structural biologists in the 2000s confirmed another instance of a biological nanoscale icosahedron-appearing structures (called bacterial microcompartments): organelles which are floating around inside bacterial cells. These structures influence the carbon cycle and our gut-health.
Above: The two gray structures are carboxysomes inside a cyanobacteria cell. Each one is approximate 150 nanometers across and contains hundreds of carbon-fixing enzymes (photo taken on an electron microscope by Eric and then false colored with Adobe Photoshop: red = cell membrane, green = cytosol, gray = carboxysome BMCs).
There's a rule underneath all of it. To close a round shell out of pentagons and hexagons, exactly twelve pentagons are needed—no matter how big the shell gets. A soccer ball follows this rule as does a virus. So does a BioBlocks: twelve pentagon tiles and twenty hexagon tiles snap together edge-to-edge into an icosahedral shell you can hold in your hand. The same way cooperative forces drive the larger shape in your hands, drive shell formation in the nanoscale.
Above: Computer models of protein shells at the nanoscale. Do you see the similarity to BioBlocks and Geodesic Domes?
Fuller believed you change the world by building a better model of it. That is what 936-Technologies is after at the nanoscale. We make the unseen bioworld something people can pick up, turn over, and understand. It was a perfect synchronicity to spend time with a community aligned with building a better world as well.
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