New studies of the “platypus of materials” help explain how their atoms arrange themselves into orderly, but nonrepeating, ...

The brilliantly shiny diamond is more than just pretty; it's one of the hardest minerals on Earth, with a name derived from the Greek word adámas, meaning unbreakable. Scientists have now engineered a ...

A new liquid crystal system rapidly switches between clear and opaque states, enabling fast smart windows and controllable emulsions for material synthesis. (Nanowerk News) Cornell researchers have ...

Creative Commons (CC): This is a Creative Commons license. Attribution (BY): Credit must be given to the creator. In this paper, we present the results of structural studies of three adenosine ...

Solidification processes in molten salts are technologically important in contexts including mineral processing and separation applications. However, high temperature and reactivity make studies of ...

From the delicate patterns of snowflakes to the robust structure of diamonds, crystals are all around us. For a long time, scientists believed their growth followed a predictable path. But now, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Crystallography is the science of analyzing the pattern produced by shining an X-ray beam through a material sample. A powder sample produces a different pattern than solid crystal. One longstanding ...

If you’ve recently been passed down a family member’s glassware collection, you might be curious about some of the pieces with intricate designs. Grandma might have called her catalog her crystal, but ...