The Mechanical Beauty of Hierarchically Organized Living Structures

By traveling through the inner structure of biological tissues, for instance by means of a scanning or a transmission electron microscope, unexpectedly exact geometries and symmetries in the form of perfect lattices, honeycomb networks, helical macromolecules and polyhedral shapes resulting from minimal surfaces can be observed. Furthermore, by exploring cells and tissues at meso‐, micro and nano‐scale levels, one discovers that self-similarity and hierarchy replicate that geometrical order and surprisingly characterize all the biological architectures, in this way de facto governing the key biomechanical functions and biochemical signaling at the basis of the life.