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Nature Materials 7, 837 (1 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/nmat2307

Material witness: A twisted tale

Philip Ball

What do the crystal structure of strontium disilicide, liquid crystals used for electro-optics and the wings of the Green Hairstreak butterfly have in common? All can be mathematically described with reference to a three-dimensional network structure known as srs, as Stephen Hyde and his colleagues explain in a recent paper (Angew. Chem.