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.

A crystals expert has published an answer to how crystals are formed and how molecules become a part of them, solving an age-old mystery about crystal formation. A million years ago, the oldest known ...

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 ...

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 ...

Crystals don't always grow the way we thought. A team of researchers has just discovered a new type of crystal that shatters preconceived ideas about how they form. Scientists from New York University ...

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 ...

Starfish embryos sprout appendages very early on in development, and the embryos can spin through water by moving those appendages. Researchers have now found that when a bunch of starfish embryos are ...

For the first time ever, researchers have watched the mesmerizing process of nanoparticles self-assembling into solid materials. In the stunning new videos, particles rain down, tumble along ...

Peter Vekilov, University of Houston Frank Worley Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has published that incorporation of molecules into crystals occurs in two steps, divided by an ...