Crystals might look simple, but their growth tells a far more complex and fascinating story. From grains of salt to diamonds, crystals form when particles lock into repeating patterns. For many years, ...

Crystals -- from sugar and table salt to snowflakes and diamonds -- don't always grow in a straightforward way. Researchers have now captured this journey from amorphous blob to orderly structures. In ...

Owing to the many different ways atoms can be arranged within the material, ice can exist in many more forms than what’s known as ice I, the type we’re all familiar with. Scientists have actually ...

In April 1982, Prof. Dan Shechtman of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology made the discovery that would later earn him the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the quasiperiodic crystal. According ...

In a new study published in Nature Physics, researchers achieved the first experimental observation of a time rondeau crystal ...

Cornell researchers have developed a two-phase liquid crystal system that can rapidly change—and hold—its shape, transforming from a transparent thin liquid film to an opaque emulsion, and then back ...

Crystals—from sugar and table salt to snowflakes and diamonds—don’t always grow in a straightforward way. New York University researchers have captured this journey from amorphous blob to orderly ...