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.
