A new shape called the scutoid has been discovered in our cells | Hacker News Reader

A new shape called the scutoid has been discovered in our cells

gizmodo.com

80 pointsColinWright16 comments

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Original paper is at:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05376-1

Related question on Math Stack Exchange:

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2864794/the-scutoid...

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I assume they just threw it in there as a joke

OK, I allow you to laugh on math and science articles then.

It's just a harmless joke. https://twitter.com/RyanFMandelbaum/status/10229322346203504...

Not sure how this is more efficient then hexagon columns

Maybe no more efficient, but probably better against shear stresses along the direction of the columns.

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.

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

can you draw it

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