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 ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Hard as it may be to imagine, there’s a newly defined geometric ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 360 BC, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an arrangement of five geometric shapes: flat-sided solids called polyhedra. These immediately ...

OctopusEffects, #aftereffects Simulate a water droplet bobbing in the water and creating waves and tiny water droplets in 2D style. Tutorial mainly using Shape layer Timestamp 00:00​ Introduction ...

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, ...

Micro decisions can have macro consequences. A soft matter physicist reveals how interactions within simple cellular collectives can lead to emergent physical traits. Biofilms lead lives of liminality ...

The first direct visualization of the shape of a photon has been created. These particles of light are impossible to photograph, but physicists at the University of Birmingham have now calculated ...

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 ...

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 ...