So you may have heard of… bees.
Yes, bees are pretty great at making hexagons, as seen in this honeycomb that I regret picking
up because now I can’t touch anything with my stickyfingers but anyway bees make not
just hexagons but 3d hexagon pockets with depth, full of bee candy, so maybe they’re
like hexagonal prisms, although not exactly cuz the bottoms of the candypockets aren’t
flat but kind of faceted, you can see the facets real well in this beeswax candle that
just has the bottoms of the cells,
But that’s not the point, the point is that hexagonal cells fit together really good to
make a flat sheet, and it’s not just bees that use hexagons see here’s a wasp nest
and besides the hexagon thing wasp nests are totally different, they’re made out of paper
not wax, they don’t store wasp candy, they don’t even store food in here they’re
just wasp pockets for more wasps, anyway, you might start to wonder what other things
are made out of hexagons, like what about our cells?
What shape are the cells in your own hand?
Usually when people talk about cells they draw this flat diagram that’s all roundy,
but of course in real life cells are 3d, wait are eggs a cell?
Well let’s just use it as the nucleus of a bigger cell, and then there's other kinds
of cell bits in there so let’s stuff those in, and while some cells might be roundy and
floating around in your blood stream or whatever some kinds of cells are snuggled up next to
each other with no space inbetween so they get all squished into really shapey shapes,
even if they began life wanting to be round.
It’s kind of like monkey bread.
You can start with these round cells floating in butterstuff, lots and lots of butterstuff
to properly simulate the mathematics of course, and once the cells puff up and all connect
to each other then they get less roundy and more faceted like a cell with shapes.
Hmm… now that I think of it there’s a lot of mathematics in monkey bread, more on
that another time.
Or maybe cells are like a bubble foam.
Individual bubbles are all roundy like a free floating cell, but once you stick a bunch
together they get all this shape stuff going on.
Anyway if you’ve ever played with beeswax you might notice that a sheet of hexagons
is pretty good at rolling up, or bending one way or another, but it doesn’t like to be
roundy.
And animals have lots of roundy bits, and anti-roundy bits, and most animals aren’t
made by bees, and roundy shapes just don’t like to be all hexagons all the time, like
a soccerball has 20 hexagons but 12 pentagons too.
so long story short some scientists and mathematicians were wondering what different shapes a sheet
of cells might be made out of and they did math to it and discovered that cells can sometimes
be like a hexagonal prism, and they can sometimes be pentagonal prisms or other kinds of prisms,
or pyramid-like prisms called frustums, but another kind of shape came up, one that didn’t
have a name.
This shape has one polygon on one end, in this case a hexagon, and a different one on
the other end, such as a pentagon, and to get from one to the other it has this little
triangle.
And you know how I feel about triangles.
And they named it the Scutoid.
And yes, they scoot.
scoot scoot scoot.
This shape is so new to the world of human language that I had to get in touch with one
of the authors of the paper, Clara Grima, to ask whether scutoids had to be hexagons
to pentagons, and it turns out scutoids come in many forms, but point is that scutoids
are alive not just in your body but as a new subject of research being done by living mathematicians
and computational biologists right now.
Scutoids are a brand new 2018 shape and winner of the 2018 Shape Awards, yaay scutoid, you
won a new award we just made up right now, but anyway next time I’ll show you how to
make your own scutoids, well, technically you’re making scutoids all over your body
all the time but you know what I mean ok bye!