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.

You might have seen sped-up videos of how some crystals form. Maybe you did the famous experiment of putting a metal ring in ...

Researchers have successfully grown platinum crystals in liquid metal, using a powerful X-ray technique giving rare insight ...

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 ...

If you dissolve sugar in hot water and then cool it down, you'll see pure sugar crystals form while impurities stay in the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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—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 ...