The optical rotatum's logarithmic spiral follows a pattern found often in nature, including nautilus shells. Credit: Capasso Lab / Harvard SEAS The optical rotatum's logarithmic spiral follows a ...

The Fibonacci sequence -- in which each successive number is the sum of its two preceding numbers -- regularly crops up in nature. It describes the number of petals around daisies, how the density of ...

Learn about the optical rotatum, a newfound structure of light that exhibits a spiral pattern linked with various parts of nature. Jack Knudson is an assistant editor for Discover Magazine who writes ...

Rippling egg: vortex-like waves spread out on the cell membrane of a starfish egg. (Courtesy: Nikta Fakhri and colleagues/MIT) Ripples that appear on the surfaces of newly fertilized eggs closely ...

An unusual arrangement of leaves in a 407-million-year-old fossilized plant is complicating scientists’ understanding of plant evolution. Most land plants living today have spiral patterns involving ...

Pushing the limits of structured light, physicists report a new type of optical vortex beam that not only twists as it travels but also changes in different parts at different rates to create unique ...

Beams of light that can be guided into corkscrew-like shapes called optical vortices are used today in a range of applications. Pushing the limits of structured light, Harvard applied physicists in ...