OK, so this is very cool, bear with this. Pollia condensata is one of the most extraordinary things in the world: it contains in its cell walls, like many many other species of plants and insects, a structure called a ‘helicoid’ (a microscale plywood shape, with layers turning round in a corkscrew). Unlike any other species though, some of the helicoids are ‘right-handed’ instead of ‘left-handed’, the corkscrew turns the other way. Imagine if, of all the clocks in the world, one had hands that went round in the other direction: we would want to know why, wouldnt we? In this paper, we found that these strangely opposite cells also have different hardness, which we hope will help to understand what’s going on.

Read the paper here