A termite mound does not look engineered. It rises in rough, uneven towers, full of crooked passages and shifting pockets of air, yet it can regulate temperature, manage airflow and stay standing in punishing conditions. Bone can do something similar. Its internal lattice looks irregular and disordered, but it carries weight, absorbs stress and holds together with surprising efficiency. That kind of structural messiness has long been hard for engineers to copy. Regular forms like cubes and spheres are easier to describe, model and optimize. Natural systems are not. Researchers at Princeton University say they have now built a mathematical framework that could make those unruly forms far easier to reproduce, not just in appearance but in how they behave mechanically. Their method links two fields that might seem unrelated at first glance: origami, the study of folding surfaces along creases, and tensegrity, the study of structures stabilized by a balance of compression and tension. “We created a theory that is applicable to two distinct physical systems,” said Glaucio Paulino, the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor …