How few corners can a shape have and still tile the plane?” mathematician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple question was about the geometry of tilings, also called ...

A cross section of a chambered nautilus shell shows the newly defined shape, the "soft cell," repeating outward in a spiral. FlamingPumpkin via Getty Images When humans cover a space using tiles of ...

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture. In 360 BCE, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an ...

The T-1000 in Terminator 2 could change shape at will, morph its hands into blades or turn parts of its body into a fluid to move through metal bars. “I saw this movie when I was a child—it was like, ...

Researchers at Westlake University have disclosed a two-dimensional (2D) mechanically interlocked polymer (MIP) that mimics medieval chainmail at the molecular scale. This micrometer-scale 2D material ...

Beer is best served cold, and it turns out that math can help with that. Cláudio de Castro Pellegrini of the Federal University of São João del-Rei in Brazil recently set out to formulate an equation ...

Influenza A virus particles strategically adapt their shape -- to become either spheres or larger filaments -- to favor their ability to infect cells depending on environmental conditions, according ...

A new species of shape-shifting octopus has just been described by scientists in Australia. The tiny cephalopod grows only about 1.6 inches across, but it can survive more than half a mile beneath the ...

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Before jumping on a new makeup or hair trend, the obvious question you may ask your friends or family is, "Do you think this would look good on me?" Totally fair, especially since different hairstyles ...