Latest Crystallography Stories

UCLA researchers are now able to peer deep within the world's tiniest structures to create three-dimensional images of individual atoms and their positions. Their research, published March 22 in the journal Nature, presents a new method for directly measuring the atomic structure of nanomaterials. "This is the first experiment where we can directly see local structures in three dimensions at atomic-scale resolution — that's never been done before," said Jianwei (John) Miao, a professor...

A recently published article in Nature Chemistry by a research team at Stockholm University and the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain presents a new porous material that evinces unique properties for converting gasoline directly into diesel World fuel consumption is shifting more and more to diesel at the expense of gasoline. A recently published article in Nature Chemistry by a research team at Stockholm University and the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain presents a...

The high resolution of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Gang Ren When Gang Ren whirls the controls of his cryo-electron microscope, he compares it to fine-tuning the gearshift and brakes of a racing bicycle. But this machine at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is a bit more complex. It costs nearly $1.5 million, operates at the frigid temperature of liquid nitrogen, and it is allowing scientists to see what no one has...

Lead sulfide (PbS) forms when an equal number of lead and sulfur atoms exchange electrons and bond together in cubic crystals. Now scientists have determined that a structure comprising 32 lead-sulfur pairs is the smallest possible cubic arrangement that exhibits the same coordination as bulk lead sulfide. (The coordination number is the number of nearest neighbors each atom in the crystal has.) Researchers from McNeese State University in Louisiana, John Hopkins University in Maryland,...

According to a new study, crystals found in Russia's Koryak mountains two years ago may have come from space. Quasicrystals had only been created in the lab before geologists found them in rocks in Russia.  These crystals are unusual and were first described in the 1980s by Israeli research Daniel Shechtman. Quasicrystals break rules of symmetry that apply to conventional crystalline structures, and they also exhibit different physical and electrical properties. Luca Bindi from the...

Using new technique researchers are able to pack molecules more closely than ever before to more than double the speed at which electrical charge can move through the semiconductor material Organic semiconductors could usher in an era of foldable smartphones, better high-definition television screens and clothing made of materials that can harvest energy from the sun needed to charge your iPad, but there is one serious drawback: Organic semiconductors do not conduct electricity very well....

For more than a century, the use of X-rays has been a prime diagnostic tool when it comes to human health. As it turns out, X-rays also are a crucial component for studying and understanding molecules, and a new approach-just published by researchers at the University of Georgia-may dramatically improve what researchers can learn using the technique. One of the primary ways scientists can understand molecules is to bombard their crystalline forms with X-ray beams. This allows a...

Design rules will enable scientists to use DNA to build nanomaterials with desired properties Nature is a master builder. Using a bottom-up approach, nature takes tiny atoms and, through chemical bonding, makes crystalline materials, like diamonds, silicon and even table salt. In all of them, the properties of the crystals depend upon the type and arrangement of atoms within the crystalline lattice. Now, a team of Northwestern University scientists has learned how to top nature by...

NEW YORK and HAIFA, ISRAEL, Oct. 5, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Distinguished Professor Dan Shechtman of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, it was announced today. The Technion is now home to three of the four Israelis in the country's history to be awarded the Nobel Prize in science. Prof. Shechtman, of the Technion Faculty of Materials Engineering, won the award for his discovery of quasicrystals - an entirely new form of matter. The...

The Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to an Israeli scientist whose work was once ridiculed for being out of line with received thinking. Daniel Shechtman, from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), won the entire $1.5 million 2011 Nobel prize for chemistry on Wednesday for discovering different ways in which atoms could be packed together in solid materials. His work has opened the door for experiments in the use of quasicrystals. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said...