#scutoid

[ask-numberjacks]

To what limits does Shape Japer's shapeshifting powers have? We've seen that she can become any shape, but does that mean... ANY shape? How about a rhombicosidodecahedron, or the disdyakis triacontahedron, or a pentakis dodecahedron! Heck, maybe even 4-D shapes, like Klein's bottle or a Tesseract?

The Shape Japer can transform into any shape, including the whatchama-hedron you mentioned (although more complex shapes are more difficult as they require more mental calculation and energy to maintain). As much as they would like to, her three-dimensional body only has the capacity to transform into three-dimensional shapes, so she can't transform into four-dimensional shapes such as a tesseract. She also cannot properly transform into shapes with holes in them, such as tori, because homeomorphism something something. They'd probably lose an eye if they tried.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[ittybittyvampires]

i’m literally just saying

[bpod-bpod]

Curve Ball

Epithelial cells – those lining cavities such as the gut as well as covering organs – packing into tissue take on a 3D shape dubbed scutoid enabling tissue curvature. Here, by studying sea star embryos, the combined influence of cell density, tissue compaction and cell proliferation on scutoid formation and resulting epithelial architecture is revealed

Read the published research article here

Video from work by Vanessa Barone and colleagues

Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA; Instituto de Biomedicina de Sevilla (IBiS), Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío/CSIC/ Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Development, May 2024

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[anonymous-leemur]

I know someone else made a default style scutoid but I wanted one with individual icons as well so here's this.

[guy60660]

Scutoid | Luisma Escudero | Universidad de Sevilla | The New Yorker

[shigeko-nobufusa]

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

In the summer of 2018, a group of researchers announced they’d discovered a new geometrical shape, the scutoid. They found the scutoid, a sort of twisted prism, in the shape of epithelial cells packed between curved surfaces. Having heard of this new geometry, a different group of physicists wondered if they could find scutoids elsewhere, specifically, in the cells of a foam. As shown in the picture above, they did.

To visualize a scutoid, first image a prism. Take two polygons with an equal number of sides and connect them. But if you imagine packing such prisms between two curved surfaces, you’ll quickly see that it won’t work. They just don’t fit together. Instead, one face may adopt, say, six sides, while the other takes on five. To join those two end faces, one of the sides will have to have a Y-shaped junction and a triangular face. This is a scutoid.

You can see two such shapes in the image above. In the left bubble, the far side forms a pentagon, while the near face is a hexagon. On the right, the bubble has six faces in the background and eight in the foreground. And between them, you can just see the triangular face that connects the two scutoids. 

It’s not only exciting to find scutoids in a new, non-biological medium; it suggests a physical mechanism behind their formation. Foams are a well-known example of energy minimization. The fact that scutoids are found in a curved foam suggests that the shape itself is connected to energy minimization, something that could help us understand how biological scutoids grow and form. (Image and research credit: A. Mughal et al.; via Physics World; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)