snowflakes’ intricate patterns (almost) always have six sides. The reason why, says science blogger Megan Nantel, is because snowflakes are made of water, and water molecules bonded together ...

Plates When many people draw a snowflake, they probably dream of a plate-shaped ice crystal. These are thin, flat, six-sided crystals that can have simple or ornate patterns. Stellar dendrite The ...

This forms a six-sided snowflake ... resembling everything from prisms and needles to the familiar lacy pattern." The terms snowflake and snow crystal have become interchangeable.

Jason Benedict, PhD, UB associate professor of chemistry, studies crystals — materials whose atoms and molecules arrange themselves in an orderly pattern when ... because 12 is a multiple of six.” But ...

While all snowflakes start in the same basic way, variations in temperature and humidity while they are forming determine the overall shape and patterns ... in the six-sided hexagonal prism.

Snowflakes’ shape and size are influenced by the conditions in which they’re formed – temperature, air currents, humidity, etc. But except in rare occurrences, they will always be six-sided.

151; -- Consider the iconic six-sided snowflake: lacy ... and the physics of how they grow is ill-understood. That growth pattern, involving ever-sharper edges of water crystals, is described ...

Saturn’s strange six-sided cloud pattern has gotten its day in the sun. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft snapped the highest-resolution images to date of the planet’s hexagonal jet stream ...

because they reflect the internal order of the crystal’s water molecules as they arrange themselves in predetermined spaces (known as “crystallization”) to form a six-sided snowflake.