crystallography – Quanta Magazine

How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It

Yasemin Saplakoglu — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:23:51 +0000

In December 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made in-person meetings impossible, hundreds of computational scientists gathered in front of their screens to watch a new era of science unfold. They were assembled for a conference, a friendly competition some of them had attended in person for almost three decades where they could all get together and obsess over the same question. Known as the protein...

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Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Snowflakes

Rebecca Boyle — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 16:00:14 +0000

Kenneth Libbrecht is that rare person who, in the middle of winter, gleefully leaves Southern California for a place like Fairbanks, Alaska, where wintertime temperatures rarely rise above freezing. There, he dons a parka and sits in a field with a camera and a piece of foam board, waiting for snow. Specifically, he seeks the sparkliest, sharpest, most beautiful snow crystals nature can produce.

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A Chemist Shines Light on a Surprising Prime Number Pattern

Natalie Wolchover — Mon, 14 May 2018 05:05:02 +0000

About a year ago, the theoretical chemist Salvatore Torquato met with the number theorist Matthew de Courcy-Ireland to explain that he had done something highly unorthodox with prime numbers, those positive integers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. A professor of chemistry at Princeton University, Torquato normally studies patterns in the structure of physical systems...

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A Quasicrystal’s Shocking Origin

Natalie Wolchover — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 15:44:24 +0000

The story of what must surely be the most interesting rock in the world has taken yet another turn. First, a recap: The rock, found some years ago in the basement of an Italian museum, turned out to be the only known natural “quasicrystal” — a dazzling, enigmatic form of matter in which atoms tessellate space in a pattern that never quite repeats. Additional tests revealed that the rock is the...

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