Spirals are an intriguing shape to find in the natural world because they have handedness – turning either to the left or right as you move along them – and it’s this property that makes the work of Dr Jasper van Wezel and his team at the University of Amsterdam particularly interesting. The recent discovery that electrons within the material Titanium-diselenide can spontaneously form into a corkscrew shape was an unexpected example of a spiral emerging in physics – and Dr van Wezel and his colleagues have dedicated the past few years to developing a simple, yet eloquent explanation.