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. Researchers have now captured this journey from amorphous blob to orderly structures. In ...

Even though people have been hunting for – and finding – gold nuggets in the Earth for hundreds of years, we haven’t stopped too often to ask how they’re formed in the first place. But could something ...

Quartz crystals in the atmosphere of foreign world WASP-17b have been found to form high-altitude clouds on the gas giant. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

Thousand-mile-per-hour winds are blowing a hail of tiny quartz crystals through the silicate-enhanced, scorching hot atmosphere of a distant gas giant planet called WASP-17b, the James Webb Space ...