Reminds me of the growing realization -- in concert with the growing ability to model and image -- that DNA has significant function "in the third" (and, I'd say, fourth) dimension.
How it's positioned influences how it behaves -- not just how it is constructed in terms of traditional direct chemical/molecular bonds.
And now, for the mind / nervous system, scientists are hypothesizing quantum mechanical functional components or aspects.
Whenever a problem or physical model is "understood"... well, personal, anecdotal, experience has taught me to... not view any such thing as "done", beyond immediate, practical, and -- within exactly that context -- sufficient applications.
A critical characteristc of Penrose tiles is that they are aperiodic. These space filling prisms do not have that property. Look up the Schmitt-Conway-Danzer tile for an example of one that does.
So imagine sheet constructed of up right hexagonal prisms. Now imagine a ray going from the centroid of the bottom hexagon through the centroid of the of the top hexagon. Now flex the sheet along an axis as if you were wrapping it around a cylinder. The rays now project out radially from the center of the cylinder. Now consider the shapes on the surface if we replaced the stretched hexagons with a Voronoi diagram based on the points where the rays come through the surface.
Remarkably the surface shapes are no longer hexagons, and the column are neither hexagonal prisms or frustums of a hexagonal pyramid, but something else entirely.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05376-1
Related question on Math Stack Exchange:
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2864794/the-scutoid...