Do perfect cubes exist in nature?
Surely they are too idealized, too immaculate to form naturally
Yet in Navajún, Spain, you can pull essentially flawless, fully-formed cubes of the mineral pyrite directly from the earth
📽 IG: minerals_de_catalunya
Conversation
Pyrite is made of iron and sulfur atoms in a cubic crystal structure. In the right conditions—a Goldilocks combo of temp/pressure/acidity/saturation—this structure is neatly replicated as pyrite grows, forming a large smooth cube
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But large 'perfect' single cubes of pyrite are rare. It's more common to find pyrite in one of many other forms: octahedrons, dodecahedrons, pyritohedrons, needles, discs, sheets, framboids, concretions
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Yet pyrite is far from the only mineral that can be cubic. Salt is perhaps the most familiar example, usually via microscopy
On the shores of the Dead Sea, however, you can find large, amazingly regular salt cubes
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Replying to
What about biological squares/cubes?
People sometimes suggest the square, salt-loving microbe Haloquadratum walsbyi, or certain rectangular diatoms, or plant cells, which can be roughly cuboid
But...
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Perhaps a stronger contender is wombat poop.
As food passes through a wombat's intestine, it's heated, dehydrated, and molded through ~100,000 contractions that consistently produce a regular, six-sided, flat-faced poop cube.
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