Tag Archives: crystals

IN A NUTSHELL 🌌 Scientists uncover evidence linking Earth’s passage through the Milky Way to geological events. 🔬 Zircon crystals serve as time capsules, revealing Earth’s cosmic interactions. 🌟 Periods in the galaxy’s spiral arms coincide with changes in Earth’s crustal dynamics. 📚 Researchers emphasize the challenge of correlation versus causation in scientific findings. The Earth’s journey through the Milky …

When most of us think about what shaped our planet, we probably picture volcanoes, earthquakes, and huge continents slowly drifting apart (or back together again) over millions or billions of years. We also know meteorite impacts were important; our crater-packed Moon is clear evidence of that. But what if Earth’s geological story was also written further afield in the stars …

When most of us think about what shaped our planet, we probably picture volcanoes, earthquakes, and huge continents slowly drifting apart (or back together again) over millions or billions of years. We also know meteorite impacts were important; our crater-packed Moon is clear evidence of that. But what if Earth’s geological story was also written further afield in the stars …

A time crystal as seen under a microscope.Credit: Zhao & Smalyukh, 2025, Nature Materials A time crystal is a form of matter that shows continuous, repeating patterns over time, much like how atoms in a normal crystal repeat in space. Examples once existed in only complex, quantum matter, but now physicists have found a way to make a time crystal …

This week’s science news has been out of this world, with NASA‘s announcement that speckled rocks found on Mars may be the clearest sign yet that life once existed on the Red Planet. The rocks all contain flecks of leopard-like spots that, on Earth at least, are telltale signs of chemical reactions that microbes use for energy. This, alongside the …

Scientists have developed the first-ever time crystals that are visible to the human eye, and they could one day make their way onto $100 bills. The time crystals emerge from the kinks that appear when light is shone onto liquid crystals — the same as those found inside LCD screens . Unlike previous time crystals, these “psychedelic tiger stripes” are …

An internationally joint research group between Singapore and Japan has unveiled a blueprint for arranging exotic, knot-like patterns of light into repeatable crystals that extend across both space and time. The work lays out how to build and control “hopfion” lattices using structured beams at two different colors, pointing to future systems for dense, robust information processing in photonics. Hopfions …

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Magnetic minerals locked inside artifacts from ancient civilizations reveal a snapshot of Earth’s magnetic field at the time. That, in turn, could give us insights into its future. | Credit: Wei-An Jin In 2008, Erez Ben-Yosef unearthed a piece of Iron Age “trash” …

In 2008, Erez Ben-Yosef unearthed a piece of Iron Age “trash” and inadvertently revealed the strongest magnetic-field anomaly ever found. Ben-Yosef, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University, had been working in southern Jordan with Ron Shaar, who was analyzing archaeological materials around the Levant. Shaar, a geologist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was building a record of the area’s …