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Liquid Crystal Nano-Flowers

The nanoscale structures of liquid crystals are rarely more exotic
than that of the sponge phases of bent-core molecules, visualized here in an
electron microscope image made by researchers at the Liquid Crystal Materials
Research (MRSEC) Center of the University of Colorado, Boulder.   The image shows a plant stalk-like network
that gives the appearance of a grayscale photo of dense tropical foliage, but here the stalk
structures are only 50 nanometers in diameter. 
Some of nature’s structural themes appear on widely different length
scales.