Washington is full of beauty — summits, mountain lakes, shrub-steppe, coulees, the Salish Sea, the Pacific Ocean and forests — that beckons us outdoors. Along with this pronounced beauty comes a ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 106, No. 26 (Jun. 30, 2009), pp. 10499-10504 (6 pages) Nacre is an exquisitely structured biocomposite of the ...

The seeds of a sunflower, the spines of a cactus, and the bracts of a pinecone all form whirling spiral patterns. Remarkable for their regularity and beauty, these natural structures also show some ...

Figure 1: Computer generated images show the placement of particles before and after a controlled rotation is added (a) and indicate some of the structures made with single particles and mixed ...