alt Hacker NewsStrange crystals found inside wreckage from the first nuclear bomb test
Comments
What was special about the first nuclear test, rather than the thousands of others, at least hundreds of which were also in the Nevada desert?
Obviously it's historically significant, and the new forms of matter were first discovered there , so that's why trinitite is named after the site. But 80 years later, wouldn't we expect the other bomb sites to have just as many interesting chemical reactions?
> The clathrate’s “cage” shapes are 12-sided dodecahedrons and 14-sided tetrakaidecahedrons made of silicon atoms...
Totally OT but if "dodeca" means 12, why isn't 14 just "tetradeca"? What's the "kai" for?
> The only other known naturally forming quasicrystal was found inside meteorite fragments
Does it really count as "naturally forming" if we had to artificially construct and detonate a nuke during a carefully conducted experiment to create this one?
One language usage question, and one content question:
"Melted sand"?? Isn't it "molten sand"? Is my hunch completely wrong, or is the author not a native speaker? Neither am I, but melted sand sounds so weird to my ears.
This all happened in a matter of seconds, so atoms didn’t have time to arrange into stable structures,[...]
The second image from the article looks like caelid map from elden ring
Oxen Free prequel incoming
While the news is interesting in itself, I found the lack of illustrations disappointing.
When discussing new novel molecular structures, one would think providing a concrete visuals of what they look like more interesting than human-scale photos of materials containing them?
Its not “where is the crystal” its “when is the crystal”
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> "a quasicrystal — a kind of matter scientists once thought impossible that challenges traditional ideas about how solids form"
Whenever I read a phrase about scientists observing something they thought was impossible ... I get really excited for scientists in that field! :-)