More Crystals Still

Crystal

These Mysterious Ultra-Rare Crystals Probably Formed in Outer Space

Gizmodo, 2016

(Please excuse the fact that I’m posting my science news via gizmodo, I just take it as it comes.)

Quasi crystals have been known for a bit, but "nobody had found a naturally occurring quasicrystal until Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt stumbled upon one in 2007" (Gizmodo, 2016)

Also, Neal Stephenson, in his mindf***ing Anathema, makes reference to a similar aperiodic repetition in his telling of a mindgame similar to chess where one tries to arrange different tiles in a crazy complex pattern that looks random but in fact uses some deep math to get there...(I think the game is called a tangram.)

Interlinks from Network Address:

Diamonds Everything

Weird Computers

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

New type of animated crystal structure discovered

phys.org Jan 2016

“The trio readily acknowledges that they have no idea if such crystals actually exist in the real world but suggest it might be possible that they are in atomic nuclei or in electrons in solids—finding them would be a challenge, however, because they would have to be seen in action, a single snapshot would not convey the motion required to see the symmetry. They also suggest that their new crystal structure could lead to some new math as was the case when static crystal structure math led to applications in number theory and even error correction in computer applications.”

Teaching a machine to spot a crystal
Jun 2018, phys.org

Crystallizing proteins is hard—really hard. Unlike the simple atoms and molecules that make up common crystals like salt and sugar, these big, bulky molecules, which can contain tens of thousands of atoms each, struggle to arrange themselves into the ordered arrays that form the basis of crystals.

"What allows an object like a protein to self-assemble into something like a crystal is a bit like magic," Charbonneau said.