U pon casual glance, the stars in the night sky might appear randomly placed. But look more carefully, and patterns-known as constellations-emerge in the sky. The building blocks of many soft materials, including glasses, granular media, and biological tissues, also appear randomly arranged yet often contain similar hidden patterns. Now Dominic Skinner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues introduce a technique that can reveal some of that subtle order [1]. Their

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... nally tractable method combines centuries-old mathematical ideas about soil transport and supply-chain optimization with more modern physics.aps.org |