Magnetism is usually taught as a story of straight lines, with field arrows marching neatly from north to south. In a lab at ...

By forcing crystal structures to compete, scientists uncovered a new way to make magnetism twist. Florida State University ...

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale. The stripes looked like a ...

(Nanowerk News) 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 ...

The seemingly random digits known as prime numbers are not nearly as scattershot as previously thought. A new analysis by Princeton University researchers has uncovered patterns in primes that are ...

In April 1982, Prof. Dan Shechtman of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology made the discovery that would later earn him the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the quasiperiodic crystal. According ...

Researchers have demonstrated that not only could patterns on liquid crystals be controlled at nanoscales, but the changes could be visible without microscopes. The work could potentially pave the way ...

Crystals are nature's most orderly substances. Inside them, atoms and molecules are arranged in regular, repeating structures, giving rise to solids that are stable and rigid—and often beautiful to ...

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 ...