To its prey on the seafloor, the mantis shrimp is known as “death incarnate”—the crustacean cocks back its two hammer-like appendages under its face, releasing them with such force that they obliterate clam shells , one of the toughest materials in nature.

But researchers discovered in 1911 that at low temperatures, electrons can induce vibrations in a metal’s atomic lattice, and those vibrations in turn draw electrons together into couples known as Cooper pairs.

“From the start, we knew almost any structure would attract lionfish,” says Steve Gittings, NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries chief scientist.Attracting, and trapping, a fish as invasive as lionfish requires intense effort.

In 1966, at McKay’s urging, Conway decided that he would discover the symmetry group of the Leech lattice, no matter how long it took.“He sort of shut himself up in this room and said goodbye to his wife, and was [planning] to work all day every day for a year,” said Richard Borcherds, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former student of Conway’s.

The next step, says Bakkers, will be to use the technique they’ve developed to create a tiny laser made from the silicon alloy.

Just swap the labels on the tiles from numbers to up or down spins, and the puzzle becomes equivalent to a Nagaoka ferromagnet, with a hole that moves through a lattice of electrons.