
A new shape called the scutoid has been discovered in our cells - ColinWright
https://gizmodo.com/the-scutoid-is-geometrys-newest-shape-and-it-could-be-1827924643
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montalbano
Original paper is at:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05376-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05376-1)

Related question on Math Stack Exchange:

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2864794/the-
scutoid...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2864794/the-scutoid-a-
new-shape)

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chris_engel
Wait, so we do not yet know which shape the cells in our body have? It reads
like we only have assumptions...

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Firerouge
It turns out it's somewhat difficult to preserve three dimensional shape when
making slides for microscopes

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pasbesoin
Reminds me of the growing realization -- in concert with the growing ability
to model and image -- that DNA has significant function "in the third" (and,
I'd say, fourth) dimension.

How it's positioned influences how it behaves -- not just how it is
constructed in terms of traditional direct chemical/molecular bonds.

And now, for the mind / nervous system, scientists are hypothesizing quantum
mechanical functional components or aspects.

Whenever a problem or physical model is "understood"... well, personal,
anecdotal, experience has taught me to... not view any such thing as "done",
beyond immediate, practical, and -- within exactly that context -- sufficient
applications.

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maneesh
Relevant and probably off topic, but this conversation about the scutoid was
posted on reddit and made me crack up, laughing out loud.

[https://i.imgur.com/8Z0f6fk.png](https://i.imgur.com/8Z0f6fk.png)

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booleandilemma
It looks like a pint of rice. Are we going to see a redesign of those
containers now?

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adasivpet
Multidimensional Penrose Tiles - is a name i would give to this.

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pgreenwood
A critical characteristc of Penrose tiles is that they are aperiodic. These
space filling prisms do not have that property. Look up the Schmitt-Conway-
Danzer tile for an example of one that does.

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sometimesijust
It is difficult to take a maths/science article that links out to clickhole
seriously.

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roblabla
It's just a harmless joke.
[https://twitter.com/RyanFMandelbaum/status/10229322346203504...](https://twitter.com/RyanFMandelbaum/status/1022932234620350464)

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techsin101
Not sure how this is more efficient then hexagon columns

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JackFr
So imagine sheet constructed of up right hexagonal prisms. Now imagine a ray
going from the centroid of the bottom hexagon through the centroid of the of
the top hexagon. Now flex the sheet along an axis as if you were wrapping it
around a cylinder. The rays now project out radially from the center of the
cylinder. Now consider the shapes on the surface if we replaced the stretched
hexagons with a Voronoi diagram based on the points where the rays come
through the surface.

Remarkably the surface shapes are no longer hexagons, and the column are
neither hexagonal prisms or frustums of a hexagonal pyramid, but something
else entirely.

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techsin101
Im confused with last part "a Voronoi diagram based on the points where the
rays come through the surface."

can you draw it

