The graph contains nearly 100,000 edges - giving cyberspace the appearance of a human lung, with its incredibly fine lattice of filaments.
But 3D printing in China is also busy at the other end of the market: extruding filaments of molten plastic to build up objects such as toys, mobile-phone cases and car fittings.
When the universe was half the age it is today, dark matter formed loose networks of filaments stretching through space and time, like wisps of cotton wool.
While the surface is fracturing, the force remains constant, and small filaments of polymer are torn off.
They could be the result of more filaments than normal connecting the areas in question.
Or the fatty coatings of the filaments might be thicker, which would amplify the signal passing along them as well as keeping water molecules on the straight-and-narrow.How synaesthesia starts (in other words, how the connections become so strong) is also unclear.
Since the filaments that connect distant nerve cells are surrounded by fatty sheaths which restrict the movement of water, such molecules tend to move along a filament rather than out of it.
In 2000 Dr Zhang did some experiments to study the motion of thin silk filaments (standing in for flags) in flowing films of liquid dishwashing soap (standing in for the breeze).As the soap film "blew" past a flag it formed streams and eddies.
The spectrograph will also be used to investigate the structure and composition of matter concentrated in the "cosmic web"—long, narrow filaments of galaxies and intergalactic gas separated by huge voids.
The top picture shows similar filaments discovered by Dr McKellar and his team, suggesting flightless dinosaurs sporting such protofeathers were still around in the late Cretaceous.In this section The dark at the end of the tunnel?
A decade ago, the only way to do this was to sprinkle the materials into silver tubes, which were then pulled into thin filaments.
