For scientists and engineers, the best way to understand a new or unknown material--whether it's an alloy, a pharmaceutical or a meteorite--is to delve into its atoms. Techniques such as X-ray ...

The discovery of a crystal whose atoms are packed in a pattern that never repeats has won Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The structures in quasicrystals, as they ...

When Lisa Tran set out to investigate patterns in liquid crystals, she didn't know what to expect. When she first looked through the microscope, she saw dancing iridescent spheres with ...

Novel lithography approach offers photonic crystal patterns with a 600 nm period. Villigen, Switzerland, January 27, 2010 - Today, Eulitha AG of Switzerland and Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. (DNP) of ...

Researchers have found special atomic patterns called quasicrystals in 3D-printed aluminum alloys. Quasicrystals increase the strength of 3D-printed aluminum, the researchers discovered, making it ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...

Because liquid crystals are similar to oil, the surfactants were attracted to the liquid crystal shells, causing the molecules to order in different ways and create striking patterns. The more soap ...