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This substance is found in abundance under the ocean floor and is an example of a clathrate. Clathrate structures are under investigation for a range of applications, such as trapping and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Unlike water clathrates, earlier nanoparticle clathrate structures had no gaps to fill with other materials that might provide new and interesting possibilities for altering the structure's properties. The team wanted to change that. "This time, we investigated what happens if we change the shape of the particle. We reasoned that if we truncate the particle a little, it would create space in the cage made by the bipyramid particles," said Sangmin Lee, a recent doctoral graduate in chemical engineering and first author of the paper. He took the three central corners off each bipyramid and discovered the sweet spot where spaces appeared in the structure but the sides of the pyramids were still intact enough that they didn't start organizing in a different