Bubble big beads (or water baby, crystal paste and so on) should be no stranger to everyone. Some of its properties have been introduced in this account before. For example, the ball made of this super absorbent resin can absorb a lot of water and expand. The refractive index of the gel ball and the water will become very close, even invisible in the water.

the following is a comparison of several gel balls before and after soaking in water, and you can see how much bigger they have become after soaking in water. And what I want to say is: have you noticed what the ball will look like in the process?

in fact, before completely soaking and turning into a full ball, these gel balls look like a crystal cerebellar flower:

this is what the same gel ball looks like at different stages of bubble swelling. these balls always form wrinkles on the surface before they become full and smooth.

these folds look a bit like brains, which reminds me of an interesting study of brain development.

there are rich sulcus folds in the human brain, which is of great significance in improving the function of the brain, but scientists have not yet really determined how these sulcus gyrus grow during development. Some researchers believe that there should be complex regulatory mechanisms in this process, but other scientists think it may be a purely physical process: the gray matter on the surface of the brain grows faster than the white matter inside. The folds of the brain naturally "squeeze" out.

interestingly, the experiment done by scientists who hold this view to test their ideas is to soak a gel crystal cerebellum flower. However, they used polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) gel and organic solvents, and used a double-layer structure to simulate the gray matter and white matter of the brain.

later, the researchers conducted more elaborate experiments, this time designing the gel according to the true appearance of the fetal brain. It turns out that the swelling of this gel in the solvent is really very similar to the brain:

Water Baby does not have a specially designed double-layer structure, but when the "bubble" is not sufficient, it is also that the outer layer is easier to absorb water than the inside, so there are similar folds.

although this experiment alone does not prove that the sulcus gyrus of the brain is produced entirely by physical processes, it is a really interesting idea. Maybe the researchers thought of it when they were soaking babies.

original study: https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3632

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