Thursday, 9 February, 2012

Despite being merely microns thick, these impurity crystals jut like skyscrapers from the surface of NF 616 cast stainless steel, a specialized engineering material. All engineering materials contain small amounts of impurities, which play an important role in the mechanical properties of the material. This image was captured with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Courtesy [...]

New snowflake generator reveals nature’s design principles; anti-reflective coating is nearly perfect, and so is mother-of-pearl inside an abalone. Dive into the nitty gritty of the itty bitty!

One fact we know from childhood: every snowflake is unique. Isn’t it? UW-Madison’s snowflake expert, meteorology professor Pao Wang, gently delivered the grim news: “Not really. I think the saying is more or less a picturesque way of saying that there are so many varieties of snowflakes, thousands of different kinds.” Wang studies how snow [...]

New view of crystals that form into planets in protoplanetary disks. Which came first, the planet or the crystals?