TotBlocks: exploring the relationships between modular rock-forming minerals with 3D-printed interlocking brick modules
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Many rock-forming chain and sheet silicate minerals, i.e., pyroxenes, amphiboles, micas, and clay minerals, are built from shared chemical building blocks known as T-O-T modules. Each module consists of two opposing chains of vertex-sharing silica tetrahedra (T), which vertically sandwich a ribbon of edge-sharing metal–oxygen octahedra (O) in a T-O-T configuration. These minerals are both abundant and diverse in the lithosphere because T-O-T modules are chemically versatile (incorporating common crustal elements, e.g., O, Si, Al, Fe, and Mg) and structurally versatile (varying as a function of module width and linkage type) over a wide range of chemical and physical conditions. Therefore, these minerals lie at the center of understanding geological processes. However, their diversity leads to the minerals developing complex, 3D crystal structures, which are challenging to communicate. Ball-and-stick models and computer visualization software are the current methods for communicating the crystal structures of minerals, but both methods have limitations in communicating the relationships between these complex crystal structures. Here, we investigate the applications of 3D printing in communicating modular mineralogy and crystal structures. The open-source TotBlocks project consists of 3D-printed, T-O-T interlocking bricks, based on ideal polyhedral representations of T and O modules, which are linked by hexagonal pegs and slots. Using TotBlocks, we explore the relationships between modular minerals within the biopyribole (biotite–pyroxene–amphibole) and palysepiole (palygorskite–sepiolite) series. The bricks can also be deconstructed into T and O layer modules to build other mineral structures such as the brucite, kaolinite–serpentine, and chlorite groups. Then, we use the T-O-T modules within these minerals to visually investigate trends in their properties, e.g., habit, cleavage angles, and symmetry/polytypism. In conclusion, the TotBlocks project provides an accessible, interactive, and versatile way to communicate the crystal structures of common rock-forming minerals.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it