The milli-motein is made of metal rings and strips. The key innovation: specially designed motors that can be instructed to move at certain angles and can hold their own position even with the power switched off. "It's effectively a one-dimensional robot that can be made in a continuous strip, without conventionally moving parts, and then folded into arbitrary shapes," Neil Gershenfeld, head of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, says. The design was inspired by proteins, which naturally assume various shapes. (Milli-motein is a mashup of "protein" and "millimeter.")