On a whim, she looked at the dots under a microscope and couldn't believe her eyes. Beautiful spiral patterns had been etched into the germanium surface by a chemical reaction. Wong's curiosity ...

While the aesthetics and symmetry of Fibonacci spiral patterns has often attracted scientists, a mathematical or physical explanation for their common occurrence in nature is yet to be discovered.

in which anticlockwise spirals predominate. This set of phenomena is called phyllotaxis, from the Greek (phyllon — leaf; taxis — order). Phyllotactic patterns have been described for centuries ...