Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have demonstrated a technique for mapping deformation in metals that can recover destroyed serial numbers on metal objects such as ...

For scientists and engineers, the best way to understand a new or unknown material--whether it's an alloy, a pharmaceutical or a meteorite--is to delve into its atoms. Techniques such as X-ray ...

The discovery of a crystal whose atoms are packed in a pattern that never repeats has won Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The structures in quasicrystals, as they ...

Andrew Iams saw something strange while looking through his electron microscope. He was examining a sliver of a new aluminum alloy at the atomic scale, searching for the key to its strength, when he ...

Because liquid crystals are similar to oil, the surfactants were attracted to the liquid crystal shells, causing the molecules to order in different ways and create striking patterns. The more soap ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...