Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: The 1945 Trinity nuclear test fused desert sand and bomb-tower materials into trinitite—a glassy substance unlike anything humans had created before.

Using finely tuned nanoscale building blocks, researchers from Brown University and the University of Michigan College of Engineering have stabilized a fleeting structural phase of matter that had ...

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 ...

UB chemist Jason Benedict and his team spent years developing photoswitchable crystals. Every crystal’s shape is a mirror of the internal arrangement of their molecules, but the molecules in ...

Waves of light and sound interact to drive electronic and structural changes in a perovskite crystal. At the atomic scale, ...

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 ...