Remember that old high school chemistry experiment where salt crystals precipitate out of a saltwater solution—or maybe the one where rock candy crystals form from sugar water? It turns out that your ...

Chemistry students at the University of Cincinnati are exploring lab-grown crystals that do extraordinary things when exposed to light. They bend. They twist. They bounce. And sometimes they explode.

Remember that old high school chemistry experiment where salt crystals precipitate out of a saltwater solution – or maybe the one where rock candy crystals form from sugar water? It turns out that ...

Crystals are usually thought of as rigid and brittle. Yet some molecular crystals can bend, jump, twist or even change shape when exposed to light. Understanding how tiny molecular movements inside an ...

This article predates Brown Brothers Media’s ownership of Science Blog and has not been reviewed under our current editorial process. It is preserved as part of the publication’s archive. New York ...

IF YESTERDAY’S ANNOUNCEMENT of the Nobel prize in physics—for developments in quantum mechanics that helped give birth to quantum computers—was greeted with general bafflement, today Sweden’s Royal ...

Chirality—often described as "handedness"—is a fundamental property of nature, underlying the behavior of molecules ranging from DNA to pharmaceuticals. While chemists have long known how to separate ...

Long spikes of crystals emanate from a single point. They glow bright blue but are slowly being overtaken by splotches of bright orange. Credit: Submitted by Prodipta Samadder These crystals are all ...