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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

For the first time, scientists have watched metal crystals take shape inside a pool of molten metal, capturing a process that ...

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 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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...