A living pseudocrystal

Although this structure seems artificial, it is made of living beings.

In its early stages of development, long before its characteristic appendages sprout, a starfish embryo resembles a tiny ball and also spins around in the water like any other ball.

Now, the team of physicist Nikta Fakhri, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, has observed that when several spinning starfish embryos get close enough to each other, they end up spontaneously assembling together, thus forming a surprisingly organized, crystal-like structure.

And, even more curiously, this collective “living crystal” can display a strange elasticity, an exotic property whereby the twisting of individual units, in this case the embryos, triggers much larger ripples throughout the structure.

Fakhri and colleagues found that this undulating crystalline configuration can persist for relatively long periods of time before dissolving as individual embryos mature.

(Image: courtesy of the researchers, colorized by MIT News. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Fakhri, fascinated, already ventures some possible practical applications derived from the discovery. For example, this ability to form assemblies like undulating crystals could be replicated and applied as a design principle, for example, in the construction of robots that move collectively as if they were a single machine. (Font: NCYT by Amazings)