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 ...

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 ...

Snowflakes are like letters from the sky, each crystal a note describing the atmosphere as it falls to the ground. They float effortlessly, but their creation is one of nature’s most complicated ...

More than 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was still young and the Earth was still growing, scientists think that a giant object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth. The biggest piece ...

Some parts of the U.S. see well over 100 inches (2.5 meters) of snow per year. Edoardo Frola/Moment Open via Getty Images The thought of snow can conjure up images of powdery slopes, days out of ...

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 ...

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 ...