In the 1980s, the scientific community was confident that it had identified all of the forms of matter in the universe. What's more, it was equally certain that crystal patterns only ever showed up in ...

A sample of a bizarre crystal once considered unnatural may have arrived on Earth 15,000 years ago, having hitched a ride on a meteorite, a new study suggests. The research strengthens the evidence ...

Taken from the December 2019 issue of Physics World where it appeared under the headline "Kamchatka or bust: an unlikely quest". Hamish Johnston reviews The Second Kind of Impossible: the ...

When Paul Steinhardt made a discovery that he had been working toward for more than 20 years, he did not cry “Eureka!” On that winter morning in the lab in 2009, he writes, he and a colleague “were ...

Once upon a time, scientists thought that quasicrystals — exotic materials with an orderly pattern that never exactly repeats itself — could not possibly exist. Then they made some in a lab in ...

A rock made of a type of crystal never before seen outside a laboratory is most likely a meteorite from the early days of the solar system, geologists say. Two years after identifying the Russian rock ...

What they do: Photonic heterostructures are designer materials synthesized from two or more substances for the purpose of blocking, manipulating and controlling the flow of light in optical circuits, ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The Church publishes the Monitor ...