For centuries, artists, biologists and mathematicians have been inspired by the recurring patterns of the plant world: the exquisite symmetry of flowers, the sweeping spirals of seeds, spines and ...

Beautiful spiral patterns had been etched into the germanium surface by a chemical reaction. Wong's curiosity led her on a journey to discover what no one had seen before: ...

David H. Gracias and a team at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA) have now developed a clever new method to produce three-dimensional patterns of chemical concentration gradients in vitro ...

The pattern also appears in mother-of-pearl mollusks, which Cartwright studied before shifting to bees. And both follow a pattern—first studied in the 1950s—of how crystals form in a spiral.