The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to tile a bathroom floor, square tiles are the simplest option—they fit together without any gaps in a grid pattern that can ...

People have been surfacing floors and walls in tile for hundreds of years; it’s one of our oldest materials. But the industry keeps reinventing the product. Digital printing and fabricating advances ...

Nature is full of patterns. Among them are tiling patterns, which mimic what you'd see on a tiled bathroom floor, characterized by both tiles and interfaces – such as grout – in between. In nature, a ...