Natural & man-made forms

Here's one of my grown-from-seed cosmos flowers, last seen on blip as tiny seedlings at the end of March. So far the seeds have produced pink, magenta and white flowers.

Alongside it are two little novelty artifacts produced at Loughborough University to illustrate the capabilities of something called "Additive Manufacturing" - a sort of 3-D printing technique, for design and engineering. Its possibilities are fantastic and not confined to plastic. These little balls have no joins, their whole shape is a single piece of plastic. They could have been made by clever carving, I think, but there are other one- piece structures produced that couldn't have been made in any other way. (Mr PicturePoems brought them home with him after attending an Additive Manufacturing Sandpit event at the university, our Alma Mater.)