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How Life and Luck Changed Earth’s Minerals

The Quanta Podcast

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The Nature of Quasi-Crystals

The rock was like no meteorite he had ever seen. It could only have formed deep inside the mantle or during an outer space impact. The lack of exact repetition allows quasi-crystals to have any possible rotational symmetry. We do not know how these atoms select such a complicated structure, said Anpang Sai, a material scientist at Tohoku University in Japan.

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