Researchers Have Discovered a New Shape, and It’s Inside Your Skin

Researchers Have Discovered a New Shape, and It’s Inside Your Skin

6 years ago
Anonymous $dicfOfy7s2

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3kyvjj/new-shape-scutoid-discovered-inside-skin

Squares, triangles, rectangles—you’d think the list of shapes we have names for is pretty well settled by this point. Not so fast: behold the “scutoid.”

The craggy, quasi-cylindrical construction may sound alien, but the scutoid is actually found about as close to home as you can get: in your skin. In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists from the University of Seville in Spain, Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and several other research institutions concluded that the type of cells responsible for forming skin and the lining of an organism’s organs will morph into scutoids in order to accommodate those organs’ complex curvature.