I immediately sought a paper model of a scutoid on the internet so I could build one (or two) ... Vi Hart did not disappoint:

http://vihart.com/scutoids/

Wow, that explanation and paper model cutout is SUCH a better explanation of the concept - got it in seconds, vs that long article.

Congrats to Vi Hart and thx for the link!

It's a prism with one of its vertices sliced off.

I guess it's kind of nifty that a computational model predicted it.

But treating the shape as being so mysterious / difficult to describe is silly.

Agreed. I don't envy mass media writers, what with the constant pressure to make their subject matter somehow entertaining.

Entertaining means different things to different people.

There are ways of making this entertaining without telling bullshit: https://youtu.be/2_NZ1ql8B8Y but I guess you need some minimal level of education and interest in mathematics to find any of that interesting in the first place.

It is not that simple, some of the faces are curved, so it is not just a prism with a slice, it is not even a polyhedra.

It is difficult to describe because the curved faces are difficult to describe, and mysterious because it was a mystery untill very recently.

Oh, not really a mystery. It just lacked a name is has properties that are had to calculate.

What is enough to publish several scientific papers and maybe enable very useful discoveries, but the shape is out there on plenty of things for people to see.

Vertices sliced off and, to one degree or another, some of the remaining vertices slid around to more regularize the new polygon you created.

Would fat cells be a scutoid, in this case? The way they are packed together is what comes to mind when reading the description of scutoids: multiple polygon faces with some rounded edges.