{
  "id": 185780,
  "title": "The mathematics of balloon animals",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/05/the-mathematics-of-balloon-animals",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-08-05T17:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "New Scientist",
    "slug": "new-scientist",
    "url": "https://www.newscientist.com/article/2582605-the-mathematics-of-balloon-animals/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The article discusses the mathematics behind creating balloon animals. In 2008, Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, and Vi Hart presented a theoretical study on balloon-twisting structures at the 20th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry. The researchers developed a mathematical framework to determine the number of balloons required to create specific shapes, such as a dog (one balloon) or a complex polyhedron like a dodecahedron (10 balloons). The authors refer to these balloons as \"Platonic balloons\" and use the term \"bloon\" for a mathematical entity equivalent to a balloon. Hart later became a science popularizer on YouTube, while Martin and Erik are father-and-son researchers and artists fascinated by the mathematics of folding.",
  "summary": "Feedback is delighted to be pointed towards an old but still vital piece of research that presents “a general mathematical and algorithmic theory for balloon-twisting structures”",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}