Presentation of Scutoid, the most recent form of geometry | Smart news

Most of us only need to master the clbadic shapes like circles, squares, triangles, and a handful of polygons to hear in this world. But that's not all – there are dozens of awesome shapes that scientists, engineers and biologists have clbadified, including things like Hemihelix, discovered in 2014, that look like a slinky folded. Now, biologists have found a new form, called scutoid. It is probably found in your armpits, on your nose and on your face, as this is a form that your skin cells take while bending.

Bruce Y. Lee to Forbes reports that the new form, described in an article in the journal Nature Communications helps to solve a long-standing riddle on human skin. Millions on millions of epithelial cells are packed together to create human skin, which is fine to be airtight and watertight. On a totally flat surface, columns, prism or cube-shaped cells could be tight enough close to each other to create such a strong barrier. But the human body has few or no totally flat surfaces (apologies to Channing Tatum's abs), which means the cubes and columns do not work. And the epithelial cells need to do extreme flexions and curvatures during embryonic development.

To solve the mystery, American and European researchers collaborated on a computer model using a process called Voronoi diagramming to understand how epithelial cells are packaged together. According to a press release, the best solution was a totally new form that the team dubbed scutoid because it looks like a top-down view of the scutellum of a beetle, part of its shell. The shape looks like a long five-sided prism with a diagonal face cut off from one end, giving this end six sides. This allows the Scaroids to be wrapped together with alternate five-sided and six-sided ends forming the surface, allowing the shapes to make curved surfaces without separating. Do not worry if it's hard to imagine – the team had a hard time understanding that too, until one of the scientists and her daughter model it using l & # 39; clay.

"During the weird 19459014 modeling process," said co-author Javier Buceta of Lehigh University in the statement. "Our model predicts that when the curvature of the fabric increases, the columns and shapes of bottles are not the only forms developed by the cells […]." To our surprise, the extra shape did not even have a name in mathematics! Jessica Boddy Gizmodo reports that the team then found scutoid-like forms in the zebrafish epithelium and salivary glands of fruit flies. Sesame Street probably will not sing a song about scutoid anytime soon, the form could have important uses in medicine. "For example, if you are looking to grow artificial organs, this discovery might help build a scaffold to encourage this type of cell packaging, faithfully reproducing the natural way of effectively developing the tissues, "says Buceta in his release.

I believe this is a major breakthrough in many ways, "confides Boddy the coauthor Luis Escudero of the University of Seville. "We are convinced that there are more implications that we try to understand as we speak."

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