Scientifically speaking, the term “crystal” refers to any solid that has an ordered chemical structure. This means that its parts are arranged in a precisely ordered pattern, like bricks in a wall.

At the heart of clouds are ice crystals. And at the heart of ice crystals, often, are aerosol particles - dust in the atmosphere onto which ice can form more easily than in the open air. It's a bit ...

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, ...

You might have seen sped-up videos of how some crystals form. Maybe you did the famous experiment of putting a metal ring in a solution rich in salt, and saw little crystals forming on it. Water is a ...

Two novel techniques, atomic-resolution real-time video and conical carbon nanotube confinement, allow researchers to view never-before-seen details about crystal formation. The observations confirm ...

Mesmerizing videos offer a new look at the ways crystals form. The real-time clips, described March 30 in Nature Nanotechnology, show closeup views of microscopic gold particles tumbling, sliding and ...

In exploring how crystals form, the researchers also came across an unusual, rod-shaped crystal that hadn’t been identified before, naming it “Zangenite” for the NYU graduate student who discovered it ...

A black hole does not have to begin with a dying star. In some corners of Einstein’s theory, it can start much smaller, from ...

(Nanowerk News) When materials reach extremely small size scales, strange things begin to happen. One of those phenomena is the formation of mesocrystals. Despite being composed of separate individual ...

Researchers at Kumamoto University have discovered that a purely inorganic crystal grown from water solution can emit circularly polarized light, a special form of light whose "handedness" ...

At the heart of ice crystals, often, are aerosol particles onto which ice can form more easily than in the open air. It's a bit mysterious how this happens, though. New research shows how crystals of ...