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CrowdScience listener Ana from Canada got in touch to ask about some strange rocks she’d seen on an island in Indonesia – jagged, rugged and strangely uniform, clicking together like a jigsaw.

On the other side of the world from Indonesia, CrowdScience listener Sarah also emailed us to ask about the famous rocks of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. What made them so uniformly hexagonal?

Presenter Alex Lathbridge heads for the Giant’s Causeway to investigate. How did this curious landscape form, and how did that influence the way the mythical rocks look today? We also hear from an Indonesian geologist about the intriguing formations there. Are these distant locations more closely related than you might expect?

And it’s not just rocks. Angular, uniform hexagons crop up surprisingly often in nature, from honeycombs to snowflakes. Why are hexagons so ubiquitous, and are they better than other shapes?