alt Hacker NewsI think the funniest part is the purity. I wouldn’t expect a natural material would be purer than something made in a lab with the explicit goal of making it pure and regular. Structure being regular could be an effect of conditions that we don’t want to pay for in the lab, but the purity is weird. I am sure the explanation (and there is a natural one) is very interesting and might open up some avenues for simpler manufacturing of the material.
Yeah, I’m hoping to replicate the higher purity natural growth pathway in synthetics. The bottom line is higher purity means more zinc for us, and it’s a common enough ion in the earth’s crust. This mine in particular has a lot of Zn dense minerals, so there’s just a lot of zinc here. Most natural crystals might be less pure, but it grows so commonly in nature, it’s less surprising that some are more pure from that perspective