UB chemist Jason Benedict and his team spent years developing photoswitchable crystals. Every crystal’s shape is a mirror of the internal arrangement of their molecules, but the molecules in ...

Most solid materials we rely on, from steel, to plastics and ceramics, are designed to have specific properties. Whether a material is soft and flexible, or stiff and tough depends on how molecules ...

Chemists have developed a generative AI model that can make it much easier to determine the structures of powdered crystal materials. The prediction model could help researchers characterize materials ...

When scientists study how materials behave under extreme conditions, they typically examine what happens under compression. But what occurs when you pull matter apart in all directions simultaneously?

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a 4D-STEM workflow that can isolate and solve atomic structures from individual nanocrystals buried inside dense, tangled clusters, ...

Metalworkers and metallurgists have long appreciated the ability to tailor the performance characteristics of steel (an alloy of iron and carbon), including their strength, hardness, ductility and ...

Although occupation of dodecahedral cages by TBAB had not been previously reported, it was found that utilizing dodecahedral cages allows for higher packing density of TBAB. The results were shared in ...

Crystals -- from sugar and table salt to snowflakes and diamonds -- don't always grow in a straightforward way. Researchers have now captured this journey from amorphous blob to orderly structures. In ...

Duplicates of crystal structures are flooding databases, implicating repositories hosting organic, inorganic, and computer-generated crystals. The issue raises questions about curation practices at ...