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The Crab nebula is regarded as one of the most important “cosmic laboratories” in astrophysics, which has made a bigger impact on the development of astronomy than any other single object beyond the solar system. The most intriguing recent result is the completely unexpected discovery of a peculiar “jet-torus” structure in the inner part of the nebula. Similar structures were found later in other Crab-like nebulae. This discovery clearly indicates significant anisotropy of the wind from the Crab pulsar which has been ignored so far in simplified theoretical models of the nebula. Fortunately, the impressive progress in computational relativistic magnetohydrodynamics in recent years has made possible to study the Crab nebula without making such a drastic simplification of the problem. In this paper we present the results of the first study of such kind. They provide a likely explanation of the jet-torus pattern and show that the flow in the nebula is much more complex than it has been widely believed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]