New studies of the "platypus of materials" help explain how their atoms arrange themselves into orderly, but nonrepeating, patterns. Since their discovery in 1982, exotic materials known as quasicrystals have bedeviled physicists and chemists. Their atoms arrange themselves into chains of pentagons, decagons, and other shapes to form patterns that never quite repeat. These patterns seem to defy physical laws and intuition. How can atoms possibly "know" how to form elaborate nonrepeating arrangements without an advanced understanding of mathematics?

In 1974, Roger Penrose, a British mathematician, created a revolutionary set of tiles that could be used to cover an infinite plane in a pattern that never repeats. In 1982, Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli crystallographer, discovered a metallic alloy whose atoms were organized unlike anything ever observed in materials science. Penrose garnered public renown on a scale rarely seen in mathematics. Shechtman won the Nobel Prize. Both scientists defied human intuition and changed our basic understanding of nature's design, revealing how infinite variation could emerge within a highly ordered environment. At the heart of their breakthroughs is "forbidden symmetry," so-called because it flies in the face of a deeply ingrained association between symmetry and repetition.

There's a store causing a disruption tucked beside The High Line in New York City. STORY works on a far different model from your average shop: it's part magazine, part press release and part trade show. The space, employees and name don't change, but instead all of the merchandise flips over every two or so months for the newest story, like a new issue of a magazine. From this week until July 24th, STORY is showcasing its "Disrupt" story, inspired by Mr. Robot, the Golden Globe-winning hacker drama from USA Network, which returns for its second season on July 13 at 10 p.m. ET. Disrupt is far more than just a Mr. Robot-themed merchandise booth.

How do you market a show about a digital vigilante trying to bring about the end of a hypercapitalist society? A show with a protagonist who sneers at social media and abhors Starbucks, and who -- at the end of the first season -- brought down the biggest corporation in the world with a cyberattack, leading to complete economic chaos? Traditional wisdom dictates that marketing efforts for such a show would shy away from anything overtly capitalistic that might come off as being inconsistent with its anticapitalistic spirit. In particular, you would probably avoid opening a store that sells 600 leather jackets and 118 light-up sneakers in the upscale Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Not so for the marketing team at USA, the NBCUniversal-owned cable network that airs the show we just described, the much-lauded drama "Mr. In advance of the show's second season, USA has partnered with Story, a brick-and-mortar store in Manhattan that functions as a sort of gallery for hire, for a special seven-week "Mr.