Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals

I love quasicrystals—like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they’ve very rare in nature. They’re created only by the most exotic and violent events: a high-speed collision of asteroids, lightning hitting a downed power cable in a sand dune—or an atomic bomb! Amazingly, the first 3 kinds of naturally occurring […]