Nervous System is part of a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers which recently received an award of up to $28.5 million to create a functional 3D bioprinted liver for people with acute liver failure from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)  Personalized Regenerative Immunocompetent Nanotechnology Tissue (PRINT) program. The project, called LIVE (Liver Immunocompetent Volumetric Engineering), is co-led by Kelly Stevens of the University of Washington and Adam Feinberg of Carnegie Mellon University. The PRINT program is led by ARPA-H Program Manager Ryan Spitler, Ph.D.

About 100,000 organ transplants take place annually in the United States, yet just as many people remain on transplant waiting lists. Not everyone survives long enough for an organ to become available. While researchers have previously created miniature organ models, these constructs have not been large enough for human transplantation. The LIVE project aims to bioprint functional human-scale livers for transplantation, addressing a critical shortage for patients with liver failure.

With this project, Nervous System continues their decade-long, pioneering work designing vascular structures for 3D-printed tissues using biologically inspired algorithms. For the past two years, Nervous System has been collaborating with the Stevens Lab to design liver specific vascular architectures. We are excited to expand this work and dive deep into developing computational models for generating complex vascular networks. Creating a bioprinted liver represents a dramatic leap in scale and complexity from the structures we have previously designed and fabricated.

This publication was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) under Award Number D25AC00460-00, providing up to $28,520,065 for a 60-month period. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

It’s time for our annual sale! Take 20% off most items with the code HOLIDAY20 (ends on Tuesday 12/2/2025). The coupon code must be entered and applied in the shopping cart. The sale includes all our puzzles including custom puzzles and most jewelry. However, certain items are excluded from the sale including engagement rings, wedding bands, and Radiolaria sculptures. 

It’s crazy to think we’ve been doing Nervous System for 18 years now. This has been a challenging year for small businesses like us. We’re deeply grateful for everyone who chose to bring a piece of our work into their lives. Your support is what lets us keep inventing weird and wonderful things. 

Gift Ideas

Big Puzzles with 400+ pieces

Custom Puzzles

$20 mini puzzles

Sterling Silver Jewelry

Stainless steel earrings

Math Puzzles

Every holiday season we release new puzzles, this year our new puzzles feature art by Franz Anthony, a scientific illustrator whose work I’ve been following for a long time. Bioluminescence ($60 with 141 coral cut pieces) Ocean Tapestry ($120 with 436 pieces in wave and coral cut) are in the shop now.

I’ve been following the work of Franz Anthony (@franzanth on bluesky) for many years now. Franz is a scientific illustrator I first encountered on Twitter back in the day, thanks to his hilarious and intriguing posts about invertebrates. He also founded #InverteFest, an online event celebrating invertebrates (on bluesky and inaturalist).

Bioluminescence Puzzle

This wooden jigsaw puzzle celebrates nature’s glowing organisms. The vibrant artwork created by scientific illustrator Franz Anthony showcases light-making organisms: bobtail squid, sea pens, mushrooms, hatchet fish, and dinoflagellates. Cut in our signature Coral style, this puzzle contains 141 wooden pieces, including 7 whimsies shaped like bioluminescent and biofluorescent life.

WHIMSIES: squid, mushrooms, jellyfish, anglerfish, a hawksbill sea turtle, and a scorpion.

Ocean Tapestry Puzzle

Explore an underwater world in this intricate artwork by scientific illustrator Franz Anthony, highlighting the incredible diversity of ocean invertebrates. From familiar jellyfish, octopuses, and crabs to wonderfully weird creatures like Christmas tree worms, mantis shrimp, and sea slugs, this scene is teeming with life. How many different species can you spot?

In the shadow of a giant whale, a drifting sea of transparent plankton completes the ecosystem. As you assemble the puzzle, you’ll journey through this vibrant habitat with a mix of two cut styles: coral-cut pieces for the bustling reef and wave-cut pieces for the open water. Scattered throughout are 19 sea creature whimsies to discover.

WHIMSIES: sea turtle, nautilus, ammonite, octopus, squid, dolphin, seahorse, swordfish, anglerfish, coral, crab, whale, sea slug, sea star, jumping whale, whale tail, copepod and two jellyfish

You can shop our puzzles here: Nervous System Puzzles.

We’ve created a set of 4 limited edition Radiolarian sculptures that are now available in our shop. These limited edition sculptures are inspired by Radiolaria, microscopic unicellular sea creatures that create skeletons from silica. Their skeletons are among the most beautiful and complex natural microstructures, resembling elaborate filigree or latticework. Artists like us have long been fascinated by Radiolaria dating back to Ernst Haeckel’s drawings in the late 19th century. We studied his drawings alongside scanning electron microscope images to create a series Radiolaria-inspired sculptures exploring their diversity of form.

The video above goes over the process of creating the sculptures. We print these in clear resin at our studio on our Formlabs Form 3 printer. Each sculpture takes between 6 hours and 14 hours to print. Afterwards, we remove the supports, clean and cure each print. This is our first time offering sculptures for sale to the general public. Please allow 2 weeks for us to produce your sculpture.

If you would rather wear a Radiolarian then consider a piece of jewelry from our our Radiozoa collection. Algorithmically generated and cast in sterling silver or brass from 3D-printed wax, these pieces transform nature’s complexity into striking, wearable designs.

What are Radiolaria?

Radiolarians are microscopic organisms that build intricate, geometric skeletons out of silica, essentially glass! They have inspired a lot of artists (including ourselves) mostly through drawings made by Ernst Haeckel. He was a 19th century naturalist who made many spectacular illustrations of microscopic life cataloged in his books Art Forms in Nature and Die Radiolarien. Here are a few that inspired the sculptures we created. All of his works are now in the public domain and can be found at the Biodiversity Heritage library and Internet Archive.

Radiolarians are abundant today in the Earth’s oceans but are also ancient dating back to the early Cambrian period. Their silica skeletons are well preserved in the fossil record making them an important source of information in geology for dating rocks. Radiolaria range from 30 microns in size to up to 2mm. They primarily live as plankton freely floating in the ocean. Their intricate skeletons serve as protection, help in capturing prey, provide structural support and improve buoyancy.

ORIGINS + Patreon

This project began when Paolo Löffler, a curator at Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, invited us to create a series of radiolaria-inspired 3D printed sculptures for their immersive exhibition ORIGINS, which explores the emergence of life. We have looked to radiolarians before, starting with our Radiolaria jewelry collection from 2007, but this commission called for a more literal interpretation. As we adapted our existing algorithms and software tools to generate Radiolaria forms, we prototyped everything in house on our Form 3 printer. The early results were so exciting that we produced a set of forty one of a kind radiolarian sculptures for our Patreon community while developing the software that eventually powered the larger, more complex models for the exhibition.

Since sharing these pieces, many people have asked if we would ever make them available to the public. For the holidays, we decided to try a small experiment and release a limited set of four sculptures.

Technical Details

To design our Radiolaria, we create cellular patterns on surfaces using centroidal Voronoi cells. We do this using Bruno Levy’s Geogram library. While we’ve extended this method to make highly controlled anisotropic patterns in the past, radiolarians tend to be so regular that we can really just use regular Voronoi cells out of the box. What really gives the radiolarians their radiolarian feel is their shapes and their spikes. Radiolarians come in a lot of different shapes, though they tend to be rotationally symmetric. The simplest is a sphere, so that’s what we started with. To make the spikes, we add a line coming out of each vertex of the cellular pattern. If you just have random lengths, it doesn’t look very organic. Our first approach was to randomize the spike lengths using a power law distribution. Why a power law? Power laws are very common in nature, so it gives it an organic feeling even though it’s totally random. Later we switched to a blue noise approach. In this method, we start with one vertex and then successively find the furthest vertex, scale down the spike length, and then add a new spike there.

Then to make it into a 3D printable object, we use OpenVDB to thicken our pattern lines. We’ve added a LevelSetCapsule class to the library to allow us to make structures out of lines very similar to LevelSetSphere which is used to make shapes out of particles. The resulting mesh is then smoothed using Laplacian smoothing.

Radiolaria observed in nature often have concentrically nested shells. To create a multilayer structure, we essentially do the same thing with a smaller sphere and a larger sphere. The smaller, interior sphere is more detailed and connects to the spiky outer sphere with regularly spaced nodal connections.

Ultimately we added other variable macro-shapes to our radiolarian generator and developed ways to further articulate the cellular structure. For the ORIGINS exhibit, we also made other families of forms, based on our Porifera and Floraform projects.

3D printing

The pieces for Kunstkraftwerk were too large to print on our Form 3, and they were needed in Germany. Although these 3D prints are fairly sturdy, shipping them overseas would have been risky and expensive. Fortunately, the Formlabs team in Berlin stepped in to help. Their office had a Form 4L printer, which produced all of the sculptures on site. We designed the supports for each model in PreForm, and Shiden Yohannes from Formlabs managed the printing in Berlin.

The sculptures for sale in our shop are printed here in the Catskills using our trusty Formlabs Form 3 3d-printer. This printer works by using UV light to cure liquid resin. The print emerges from the resin bath and ends up suspended from the build plate by the supports. Here’s an example showing what the support structures for these prints look like. We often get questions about how we remove the supports. It’s actually quite simple most of time. Watch the video below to see how Jesse pops one of our radiolarians off the supports.

The ORIGINS immersive exhibition is currently open in Berlin. Radioaria inspired sculptures and jewelry can be purchased in the Nervous System Shop.

We’re excited to announce Flummoxagon, a new geometric puzzle game that might just leave you flummoxed. Imagine a mash-up of Pentominoes and Sudoku. Your goal is to fit all the pieces into the hexagon frame but there’s a twist, pieces of the same color can’t touch.  

It’s a fiendishly fun mix of Tetris-style block packing and logic-based constraint solving. The game ships with 13 gameboards, featuring puzzles from beginner to advanced, and new boards are added weekly to our website.

You can buy Flummoxagon now in our shop for $45. For the first month, take 20% off with the coupon code FLUMMOX (ends 10/31/2025).

How do you play?

Flummoxagon is made up of 48 tiles representing every shape you can make by joining up to 5 hexagons. All the tiles fit into a hexagonal frame and they come in 4 colors. There are 12 pieces of each color and 54 hexagons of each color (except green since there are an odd number of hexagons in the grid). The challenge is to place every piece into the frame without letting two tiles of the same color touch.  Now, there are hundreds of thousands of ways to do this; however, finding one on your own is nearly impossible (though let us know if you manage it!). 

Instead of an empty grid, to play the Flummoxagon, you start with a partially filled gameboard that only has one unique solution, just like a Sudoku. Each gameboard creates a challenging puzzle to solve. The puzzle ships with 13 of these gameboards of varying levels of difficulty, and we add new puzzles weekly on our website for endless challenges.

How did we get here?

Jules has been interested in these kinds of tiling patterns since before he worked at Nervous System. He built a solver for placing tiles on a grid which is a version of a problem called an “exact cover.” Instead of a puzzle, he used it to make patterns which he turned into cast vessels. When he started working here, he wanted to use it to make a puzzle, which he did for friends and family. The first version had no colors. There were two problems turning this into a product. First, it already exists. Other people have made polyhex puzzles before. Second, more interestingly, was the playability. It took him 20-30 minutes to solve the puzzle. Even though the puzzle has millions of solutions without colors, there’s not really much of a reason to find another one. That gave us the idea to add a coloring to the pieces. This gives you a way to meaningfully differentiate solutions. You could ignore colors, you could say all like colors need to touch, or (like the classic map coloring problem) that no two alike colors could touch. That gives you a reason to put it together multiple times.

However, we quickly realized that even though there are still hundreds of thousands of solutions to the puzzle with the coloring rule, actually finding one as a human is extremely difficult. Maybe someone could do it, but it would take a lot of luck, a lot of time, or both. So it doesn’t add a lot of playability if one of the ways you can do it is essentially impossible (unless you’re a masochist). This led us to the insight that really makes this puzzle fun. What if instead of doing the full colored puzzle, we find partial sets of tiles where there is only one unique solution? This adds enough constraints to the problem that it becomes feasible. Now we’ve created something that’s more like Sudoku than a tiling puzzle. Each scenario presents a new set of constraints to solve. And we have near endless possibilities for designing new puzzle scenarios that range from easy to extremely difficult. We didn’t just make 1 new way of putting together the puzzle, we made a whole new family of puzzles.

This also justified having an automatic solver, which is what we were actually excited about in the first place. The original version of the puzzle didn’t really need the solver at all. Sure, you could find thousands of solutions, but to what end? Now the solver is an integral ingredient in the puzzle. Not only do we use it to generate scenarios, we also use it to grade the difficulty of them (without having to do every one ourselves).

Technical Details

The tiling solver is really the crux of this project. The method is from the famous computer scientist Donald Knuth and involves a clever representation of the problem to enable efficiently searching for solutions. Consider the problem of placing the polyhex tiles of size one through three onto the pictured grid.

In exact cover, there is a universe of elements and a collection of subsets of those elements. The problem is to choose some of those subsets so that each element in the universe is represented exactly once. In the case of tile placement, there is one element for each cell in the grid to be covered, and one element for each tile’s name. Every valid tile placement is represented by a corresponding subset of these elements. If we number the grid and tiles as shown, we could represent placing the single hex tile in the upper left hex of the grid as {5,12} or placing the straight three tile hex along the bottom of the grid as {7,8,9,14}. We could then represent all possible tile placements as an array with columns identified to the grid cells and tile names and with one row for every possible tile placement.

The columns of the above array represent constraints that must be fulfilled in every tiling of the grid; each cell must be covered by a single tile and each tile must be placed into the grid exactly once. In order to represent the constraint that no two tiles of the same color may touch, you can introduce “optional columns” representing a color touching an edge in the grid. For each edge in the grid, four columns are added to our array, one for each color. These columns are not required to be covered at all, but are required not to be covered more than once, as that would represent two tiles of the same color touching. 

Donald Knuth popularized a simple algorithm for solving this problem called Algorithm X. Algorithm X is based on the observation that each column can be considered sequentially when searching for a solution. Choose a column to cover, then choose a row that covers that column. Then look along the row you chose and delete every other row that shares a column with that row, since those rows can’t be part of a solution with the row you already chose. 

If the array has an empty column with no rows to fill it then you have to backtrack by adding all the rows you deleted in the last step back into the array and choosing another row. Then if there are no more rows to choose from in your chosen column you also need to backtrack. If all the columns are covered, then you have found a solution.  

The naïve approach of deleting and re-adding rows to an array has two problems: The first is that the arrays that show up in covering problems tend to be very sparse and so are expensive to store as solid blocks of zeroes and ones. The second is that repeatedly deleting and re-adding rows to an array is very time consuming.

Knuth introduced a technique called Dancing Links that makes this kind of search much more efficient. The idea hinges on the reversibility of deleting an element from a linked list. In a doubly linked list, each element points to its neighbors, and to travel along it either left or right you just follow the arrows from one element to the next. 

To delete x from the list, you need to make the neighbors of x point past x to each other. Importantly, this doesn’t change the things x itself is pointing to:

R[L[x]] = R[x] and L[R[x]] = L[x]

To put x back into the list, you can just say that the things x is pointing to should point back to it:

R[L[x]] = x and L[R[x]] = x

You can use this idea to represent the array as a linked structure where every element points to its four neighbors in row and column, and rather than erasing rows from the array you can “cover” and “uncover” them using these operations. This representation is much smaller in memory, and it avoids the problem of clearing and reallocating memory, making it much faster.

We’re excited to host our very first Open Studio event at our workshop in Palenville, NY!

Stop by to check out our latest sculpture prototypes, shop our wooden puzzles and jewelry, or just hang out and chat about art, science, math, fabrication, or whatever sparks your interest. This is the first time we’re opening up our space to the public and we’re really looking forward to sharing it with you.

When we moved to the Catskills in 2019, we dreamed of hosting regular public events. But by the time we finished building our studio behind the house, the pandemic hit, and then we had two kids. So this has been a long time coming.

We’re also part of Palenville Open Studios, with several other local artists opening their doors the same day. Plus, we’ll be hosting a group exhibition in our barn featuring work by other artists from the area.

A map of all participating studios will be posted closer to the event at Palenville the Hamlet.

Date: August 16th, 2025 from 10am to 4pm

Location: Nervous System, 3292 Route 23a, Palenville, NY (blue metal building at end of driveway). Park by the green house or the blue barn

We recently created a set of sculptural award plaques for a new fund at The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. The Moore Family Fund for underwriting creativity, knowledge, experimentation, research and yumminess will fund antidisciplinary undergraduate research (learn more here). Dan Moore (a senior technical artist at NVIDIA) commissioned us to design a unique set of perpetual award plaques that will hold the names of recipients over the next 75 years.

Rethinking the Award Plaque

Typical award plaques are simple rectangular slabs with a grid of metal nameplates, each engraved year after year. We wanted to break away from that rigid structure and explore a more organic, cellular design. Carved from rich walnut, these plaques have flowing, sculptural contours that evoke natural growth processes. Instead of a traditional grid, the black nameplates are arranged within an intricate, algorithmically generated pattern—reminiscent of plant cells or the skeletal structures of microscopic radiolaria.

To make them extra special (and meet the request to make them fancy), we adorned the plaques with intricate maple inlays, creating a striking contrast that highlights the delicate cellular network. The result is a fusion of nature and computation, celebrating creativity and complexity—perfectly fitting for an award dedicated to interdisciplinary exploration.

Materials / Fabrication

This design consists of three materials: walnut for the base, maple veneer for the inlay, and aluminum for the nameplates. While we were able to fabricate all the wood components in-house, we had to outsource the metal parts since we don’t have a reliable way to cut aluminum ourselves.

We visited Ghent Wood Products, a local lumber mill, to source the walnut. We ended up buying a MASSIVE slab of walnut. We considered buying smaller pieces and joining them together or buying pre-made walnut butcher block but the price was going to be similar for a worse result. The slab we bought is 12 feet long, 1.5″ thick and 23″ wide at the widest point. The entire piece is not suitable for plaques due to a split on one end and some large knots. We’ll have to find some other use for the rest of the wood.

For the inlay, we used paper-backed maple veneer. We also tried unbacked veneer, but it expanded too much when glue was applied, throwing off the fit. That misstep resulted in the tedious task of picking out the failed inlay with dental picks (fun times).

The aluminum name plates were made by Xometry. They were lasercut with a fiber laser from aluminum. After cutting, they were be beadblasted, anodized black and put in tagged baggies. Each one is a unique shape so we need to keep track of which is which!

Prototyping

Before committing to the full plaques, we ran through the fabrication process on a smaller piece of walnut as a test. We used our ShopBot Desktop CNC to plane the surface, cut out the shape, and round over the edges. Our Trotec laser cutter handled the maple veneer cutting and rastered pockets into the walnut for inlay placement. After gluing the veneer into the walnut, we clamped everything and let it set.

The test run was worth it—we discovered some planing marks that didn’t sand out completely and slightly oversanded the veneer in one spot, creating a dark patch.

Software

The plaques build off our Corollaria design software (some background in our blog here). Like most of our projects, our custom software is doing the heavy lifting but it’s aided by some back and forth in Rhino. We figured out the overall shapes and sizes of the plaques in Rhino and then bring them into our C++ software to grow the cellular patterns. After that, it’s back to Rhino where we used grasshopper to offset some of the cells for the name plates and number everything for fabrication. Visualization renderings were done in Blender using the built-in cycles render engine.

This project was a fantastic blend of design, craft, and computation—exactly the kind of challenge we love. From sourcing the perfect walnut slab to fine-tuning the cellular patterns, every step was an adventure (even the dental pick rescue mission). We had a great time bringing these plaques to life and would love to explore more custom award designs in the future. If you’re looking for something beyond the ordinary, let’s make it happen!

Nervous System’s wooden jigsaw puzzles feature unique nature-inspired piece shapes. Learn more about our cut styles below: Dendrite, Amoeba, Maze, Wave, Coral and Matrix. Each style is generated by software we created to mimic the way patterns form in nature. Instead of drawing the puzzle cuts by hand, we grow them using math and science.

Dendrite

Our original puzzle cut based on crystal formation

The puzzle’s pieces grow into each other, interlocking with shapes similar to dendritic crystals or ice formations. We introduced the Dendrite cut in 2012 with our Radial Puzzle series.

Dendrite grows interlocking shapes through a simulation of dendritic solidification, a crystal growth process similar to the formation of snowflakes that occurs in supercooled solutions of certain metallic alloys. Starting from initial cellular piece shapes, the edges are perturbed and then interlocking branching knobs emerge as the crystal simulation proceeds. The software uses a technique called phase-field modelling, where each puzzle piece is treated as a different phase of matter that is “freezing” into it’s neighbors. This physically impossible process is only possible in the world of computation and mathematics.

Shop Dendrite Cut puzzles

Small cilia-esque protrusions create a repetitive pattern with higher piece density. Originally introduced in 2012 as part of the McCabism Puzzles, the Amoeba cut is the star of our challenging Patchwork Amoeba Puzzle and the whimsical Herding Cats Puzzle. The Amoeba cut is a variation of our Dendrite cut system, using the same dendritic solidification simulation but with different parameters.

Shop Amoeba Cut puzzles

Maze

A dense, maze-like cut pattern

The extreme intertwining and high piece count makes Maze our hardest cut style. Introduced in 2017 with our Geode and Agate puzzles, this is the cut that really put us on the puzzle map! It is our most intricate cut style, with almost twice the number of pieces as our Dendrite cut puzzles. The pieces are so stretched and distorted that it can be hard to distinguish where one ends and another begins. When examined individually, the pieces almost look like strange glyphs from an alien alphabet.

The Maze puzzle cut style is based on a simulation of growing elastic rods. However, it didn’t start out as a puzzle-making system. Originally, it was a 3D system for making expanding lattices using a technique called Position and Orientation Based Cosserat Rods—but that is a project for another time. In a freak accident during testing, we realized that in 2D, it would make intriguing interlocking shapes.

The Maze puzzle generation starts the same as our Dendrite system, with straight edged cellular pieces. From here, Maze diverges, simulating each as edge as a growing elastic rods. Each rod wants to be straight; but in the confined space of the puzzle, they are forced to bend as they grow. The rods grow, lengthening, until they collide, pushing each other into contorted shapes. (Disclaimer: Maze style not actually a maze.)

Shop Maze Cut puzzles

Wave

A swirling, spiraling puzzle cut

The Wave Cut was introduced in 2022 to complement the fluid theme of the Marbling Infinity Puzzles made in collaboration with Amanda Ghassaei. The Wave style is an evolution of our Maze cut. Vortices pull the pieces into waves, spirals and hammerheads

We took our Maze system of growing elastic rods and introduced vortex forces which draw the growing edges into waves and spirals. Each edge is given a certain number of vortices depending on it’s length, and those vortices travel with the edge as it grows. In addition, the initial piece shapes are determined by an anisotropic centroidal voronoi optimization, elongating them in flow fields which themselves form waves and spirals.

Shop Wave Cut puzzles

Matrix

A geometric, crystalline cut pattern

The Matrix cut is our take on a grid based puzzle style. However, this grid flows and conforms to a changing direction field which matches the puzzle border. The Matrix cut was introduced in 2023 for our Bismuth Crystal puzzles series. We wanted a cut that would match the rhombohedral symmetry of the bismuth crystal while also accentuating each puzzle’s unique shape. 

The puzzle cut starts by generating a quad dominant grid which conforms to the puzzle shape, whimsies, and any special features we want to add. This fine grid is then grouped into rough piece shapes. These pieces are then optimized to increase interlocking and balance piece size. The optimization does a brute force search of possible swaps of grid cells between neighboring pieces, looking ahead several moves to find the best shape.

Shop Matrix Cut puzzles

Coral

Amorphous, interlocking pieces reminiscent of undersea life

Wandering circular arcs compose the edges of this playful cut. The arcs’ meandering paths make for highly-interlocking pieces reminiscent of undersea life. Undulating arms ripple like seaweed and join together pieces. The Coral cut was introduced in 2023 with our Jellyfish Dreams puzzle and has also appeared in our biology puzzles, Séguy butterfly and Eclipse puzzles. 

Shop Coral Cut puzzles

The Coral cut is first puzzle cut conceptualized and developed by Jules Khan, Nervous System’s NY puzzle master. As with most of our puzzles, it start with initial cellular shapes. The edges are then replaced by random walks of circular arcs which are scored by their lengths and degree of interlocking. The system then chooses the highest scoring edges it finds while avoiding self-intersections.

Today we are launching three new wooden puzzles bursting with butterflies! These puzzles feature the artwork of Emile-Allain Séguy, a French artist known for his intricate Art Nouveau and Art Deco illustrations of insects. I’ve long been a fan of Séguy’s artwork (we have two of his insect prints hanging in our home) and felt they would make excellent jigsaw puzzles. We’re showcasing four of our unique nature inspired puzzle cuts in this series: Coral, Maze, Matrix, and Wave. Each puzzle has a shaped border, vibrant UV printed colors printed directly on wood, and many butterfly and moth shaped puzzle pieces. Shop the Papillons collection here.

Séguy’s illustrations each feature 5 different species of butterfly and moth but we named the puzzles after our favorite creature from each image: Sunset Moth Puzzle (181 pieces, Matrix cut, $70), Zebra Mosaic Butterfly Puzzle (378 pieces, Wave and Coral cut, $105), Numberwings Butterfly Puzzle (247 pieces, Maze cut, $70).

Numberwings Butterfly Puzzle is based on Papillons plate 11 by E.A. Séguy
Featuring the Numberwings butterfly, Giant Blue Swallowtail, Tree-nymph, Stalachtis phlegia and Papilio pylades. My favorite butterfly in this artwork is the Numberwings (genus Callicore) , whose hindwings feature a striking pattern of dots that resemble numbers. These are often called eighty-eights!

Sunset Moth puzzle based Papillons plate 7 by E.A. Séguy
Featuring the Madagascan sunset moth, green-banded urania moth, and red flasher butterfly. At the heart of the design is the breathtaking Madagascan sunset moth (Chrysiridia rhipheus), known for its shimmering rainbow-hued scales.

Zebra Mosaic Butterfly Puzzle based on Papillons plate 3 by E.A. Séguy
Featuring Zebra Mosaic Butterfly, Mexican Silverspot, Common Joker, Blue Cracker and Variable Tigerwing.

You can view the complete book in the Internet Archive: Papillons by E.A. Séguy. Shop the Papillons puzzle collection here.

Watch Puzzle Cutting and Solving live on Twitch

We streamed lasercutting the Numberwings puzzle last week on our Twitch channel. Check out the recording below to see the full process. Join us this Thursday evening starting at 7:30pm EST as we try to solve one of the new puzzles live.

It’s been 4 years since we released the Herding Cats Puzzle, the first puzzle we ever released from our new studio in the Catskills. At the time, we promised the release of a dog version was already in the works. A lot has happened since: having 2 children, making our first public art works, ongoing pandemic, etc. It took a little longer than expected but it’s finally here: the Dog Pack Puzzle! We’re hoping this the perfect puzzle to share with your family this holiday season. When you order from us your supporting a small US based manufacturing company (there aren’t many of us!). All our puzzles are made from scratch at our workshop in the Catskill Mountains of NY.

Dog Pack Puzzle

The Dog Pack Puzzle features vibrant art by Anne Sullivan (who also created the art for our Cat and Owl Puzzles). Over thirty whimsical canines are packed into this 247-piece wooden puzzle. We’ve got big dogs & small dogs; fluffy pups & short-haired friends; a dog with a bone; lounging dogs; dogs that are sniffing, fetching, jumping, rolling, and generally being good boys and girls. Check out our other animal puzzles here.

Mini Wooden Puzzles – edition 3

For the holidays we also have 3 new mini puzzles. These were originally conceived as stocking stuffer puzzles. We wanted to make a smaller (and cheaper) puzzle that let people get a taste of our different cut styles. This edition has three new puzzles in it: Jewel Beetle, Panther Chameleon and Nudibranch. The jewel beetle has our matrix cut, chameleon has our wave cut and the nudibranch has our coral cut. The previous two editions of mini puzzles are available here.

Patreon updates

Thank you to everyone who has supported us on Patreon so far! It’s time to ship the first set of physical rewards. Every 4 months we ship out exclusive gifts to our Patreon supports in the Axon, Neuron, Nucleus and Galaxy Brain Tiers. We have now printed 38 unique radiolaria sculptures to mail and have started production on a special double-sided puzzle for the puzzle tiers. These should arrive before the holidays <3. You can still join us on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/nervoussystem/