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He believes the tunability is a result of the poorly understood properties of granular materials, in which grains are individually solid but can also flow as a group like a liquid or a gas. This split personality may be why patterns form in sand dunes, even though each sand grain moves randomly. Similarly, the beads in the laser moved randomly when they were shaken, yet exhibited patterns in their distance from each other that changed with shaking frequency. "Randomness has a richness, in this sense," says Conti.