You're listening to Brains on from MPR News and Southern California Public Radio.

We're serious about being curious.

I'm Molly Bloom.

The other day here in Minnesota, it's snowed and the flakes were big and fluffy.

Looking out the window, it was like we were living in a snow globe.

From a distance, snowflakes may all look the same, but they are not.

In fact, there are lots of different shapes of snowflakes.

It's just those classic shapes you might try to replicate by making paper cutouts.

Simple prisons, sheets, scrolls on plate, cups, hollow columns, 12 branched stars, bullet

rosettes, caped columns, skeletal forms, radiating dendrites, arrowhead twins, crossed plates,

grapple, irregular, simple needles, simple stars.

These are just some of the kinds of snowflakes you might see if you were to look at them under

a microscope.

All different shapes and sizes, which brings us to our first question.

Hi, my name is Lucy and I am six years old.

Hi, my name is Sam and I'm eight years old and we're from Colorado.

And our question is, why are snowflakes all different shapes?

To find the answer, we talked to Ken Leebrecht, a physicist from Caltech who is an expert

on snowflakes.

First, we have to understand how snowflakes form up in the atmosphere.

It starts out as a water droplet in the cloud.

Clouds are made of mostly water droplets even when it's below freezing.

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