Stripes in a flowing liquid crystal suggest a route to “chiral” fluids

Study finds chiral structures, with mirror-image configurations, can emerge from nonchiral systems, suggesting new ways to engineer these materials.

Hold your hands out in front of you, and no matter how you rotate them, it’s impossible to superimpose one over the other. Our hands are a perfect example of chirality — a geometric configuration by which an object cannot be superimposed onto its mirror image.