“Pearls, the most flawless and highly prized of them, are perhaps the most perfectly spherical macroscopic bodies in the biological world. How are they so round?” So begin Julyan Cartwright at the ...

Mollusks maintain the symmetry of their pearls by adjusting the thickness of each layer of shimmering nacre. If one layer of the pearl’s nacre is thinner, the next layer is thicker and will balance ...

We know how oysters make pearls, but how can they be perfectly spherical? A new theory says their remarkable structure allows them to naturally rotate in the shell. One of the most beautiful and ...

The mystery of how pearls form into the most perfectly spherical large objects in nature may have an unlikely explanation, scientists are proposing in a new study. The mystery of how pearls form into ...