Circles, squares, triangles, rhombi and … hemihelices? Yes, meet the hemihelix, the new shape we’ll have to learn.
Katia Bertoldi, a researcher at Harvard University, was trying to come up with a new type of spring. She was intertwining strips of rubber and testing different lengths and widths when she suddenly realised she had formed a shape that looked like "a corkscrew with a mirror in the middle", as described by Jason Koebler over at Motherboard.
Bertoldi and her team were baffled. They developed more experiments to confirm that indeed this was a new shape. After twisting and turning more strips of rubber bands – and even some paper clips – they confirmed their results and published them recently in the journal PLOS One.
What real applications will this corkscrew-like shape have? Researchers believe it could be used in nano devices and to create new sensors, but will have to wait and see.
In the meantime watch some of the experiments that Bertoldi and her team devised to confirm the existence of hemihelix.
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