Scientifically speaking, the term “crystal” refers to any solid that has an ordered chemical structure. This means that its parts are arranged in a precisely ordered pattern, like bricks in a wall.

Crystals -- from sugar and table salt to snowflakes and diamonds -- don't always grow in a straightforward way. Researchers have now captured this journey from amorphous blob to orderly structures. In ...

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Thousand-mile-per-hour winds are blowing a hail of tiny quartz crystals through the silicate-enhanced, scorching hot atmosphere of a distant gas giant planet called WASP-17b, the James Webb Space ...