Honeycomb aligned. Thus, each cell has two vertically oriented walls, with the upper and lower parts of the cells composed of two angled walls. The open end of a cell is typically referred to as the top of the cell, while the opposite end is called the bottom. The cells slope slightly upwards, between 9 and 14°, towards the open ends. Two possible explanations exist as to why honeycomb is composed of hexagons, rather than any other shape. First, the hexagonal tiling creates a partition with equal-sized cells, while minimizing the total perimeter of the cells. Known in geometry as the
Tetrahedral-octahedral honeycomb in 3 of 4 hyperplanes of the [4,3], formula_4 Coxeter group. Cells are irregular pyramids and can be seen as 1/12 of a cube, or 1/24 of a rhombic dodecahedron, each defined with three corner and the cube center. A related uniform skew apeirohedron exists with the same vertex arrangement, but triangles and square removed. It can be seen as truncated tetrahedra and truncated cubes augmented together. The gyrated tetrahedral-octahedral honeycomb or gyrated alternated cubic honeycomb is a space-filling tessellation (or honeycomb) in Euclidean 3-space made up of octahedra and tetrahedra in a ratio of 1:2. It is vertex-uniform with