A type of crystal that breaks the rules of ordinary crystallography has been found in a tube of melted sand from Nebraska.
A tube of "fossilized lightning" from Nebraska's Sandhills holds a rare type of quasicrystal that had previously only been found in meteorites and at atomic bomb test sites.
Quasicrystals are materials that break the traditional rules of crystallography. Before they were first reported in 1984, scientists thought materials could either be crystalline — with symmetrical, repeating patterns — or amorphous, meaning randomly arranged and disordered. In addition, scientists believed crystals could only be symmetrical a limited number of times when rotated around an axis — two, three, four or six times.
Quasicrystals break those rules. They're put together in an ordered pattern, but that pattern does repeat. They also have rotational symmetries that no ordinary crystal can achieve. A quasicrystal with icosahedral symmetry, for example, can display five-fold symmetry around six different lines of rotation.
Where The Lightning Strikes -- rated G, ~1250 words
A brief encounter in the Oxford Museum Of Natural History, in which Science meets Story.
“Anthony Crowley.” If the man was a rock star, he was using an alias. But of course he would. “So you’re keen on these?” He nodded at the display case, with its array of branching and contorted mineral formations.
“I’d love to go hunting them,” said Jeremy. “But they’re very rare, and we’re not near any deserts or even beaches. Maybe next year, when I’m allowed to drive.”
“Funnily enough, I have one,” said the man. “It came with a story. Would you like to hear it?”
Read On AO3
Tagging in the replies as per usual -- let me know if you want to be added to (or taken off) the tag list!
Fulgurites (or sintered soil or petrified lightning) are super cool! They're branching tubes of glass formed when lightning hits sand, in layman's terms, fossilized lightning! If you think the ages of the rocks around you are cool, imagine holding the remnant of an ancient storm!
They can be found all over the world, but are much more common in areas with lots of sand, and are pretty delicate. Finding big ones or ones with the preserved lichtenberg branches are pretty rare.
This one was delicate enough that it was see-through
You can actually calculate how powerful the lightning strike was by the diameter of the interior of the fulgurite! They may look sandy on the outside, but all of them have a hollow smooth glass interior.
Here are some of the ones I found at a sand mine (estimated to be around 500,000 years old)!
Someday, she will be your wife and your green place will be at the back of her thighs, the garden of it limned in the supple, sensitive nerves and lymph-channels that river over strong muscle tissue, red flesh taut with all her years as track champion.
For now, she is your rival, and when the gun goes off you run as though for fear or for dearness of your life — and in many ways the statement is factual — and for a glorious, singular moment the two of you are shoulder to shoulder, but your legs are an inch too short to overtake her, and she casts an easy, careless, devil’s grin your way before she amps her speed, as though saying, I was going easy on you the first hundred.
You’d yell, but it’d take breath from you. You come in second place, half a second behind her, and yelling now would be unsightly, lacking sportsmanship; so you wait until you are alone at night, locked and safe in your room. The pillow is a weathered confidante, a priest to the confessions in your outbursts.
“Why’s she so good?” you ask, addressing nobody in particular. It’s not like the teddybears know, even if they could answer. “Why’s she so fucking gifted? It’s no fair.” Your glare at the ceiling. “Hear that, God? It’s not fair!”
Your cellphone buzzes, left on vibrate but off DND. Someday, she will be Dahling in your phone, because that’s the affect she says the word with and, someday, you will have mellowed out enough to admit you find it to be utterly endearing. Right now her name is given as simply: Lyra in 3-C.
Hey, loser, the text reads. Fancy a burger? I know you don’t want anyone knowing how much you actually love Mickey D’s, but I do too so I ain’t gonna be judgin’. Or snitchin’.
Almost as soon as you’re finished reading, another text swooshes on the screen: I’m outside, jsyk, and I can C the light’s on. Come down. Don’t be so sore, yeah?
You open the window. Mouth, fuck you, but still slip on your jeans and make the short drop from the first-story sill to the front lawn. Lyra laughs, and laughs, and someday you’ll be content enough with yourself to shut her up by kissing her, because honestly, she laughs like a fucking hyena, and it’s so not cute. For now you content yourself with swatting her arm. It only makes her laugh harder.
“You’re a fucking bully, you know that?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she says, shimmies out of her varsity jacket to cover the goosepricks on your arms, because in your haste to get out you forgot you were in your camisole. “Big bully, me.” She pulls your hair out from under the fabric, and it’s almost tender. Her hands linger at your neck, and suddenly she’s too close, suddenly you’re too aware of your pulse, suddenly it’s hard to breathe. She clears her throat. “So. Hamburgers, or?”
“Yeah.” You narrow your eyes. “Got a problem with that, you Big Mac lover?”
She’s laughing again, and why is it so damn easy to be around her. “Why’re you saying that like it’s an insult?”
“’cause it is.”
“Ain’t.”
“Is, too.”
Someday, she will be your wife, and you will still wrinkle your nose at her choice in burgers; Simple is better is your mantra, and by that standard each of her Big Macs is a crime. For now, you loop your arm through hers, and lament that the walk to her car’s so damn short.
You glance at her out of the corner of your eye, and something in you hitches.
Hades fixes his wife with a fish-eyed stare. “Easy for you to say,” he huffs. “He loves your gingerbread and your honeycakes. Your Scythian pastries, too.” Then, lower, under the edge of his breath: “Damned be those Athenian cooks, all but tripping over themselves in their haste to attain the honour of teaching you their secret recipes.”
“Baby,” Persephone says, pointedly, and she would have pointed, too, had Kerberus not been licking at her hands with quite so much delight. “You are a giant baby.”
Hades huffs, crosses his arms over his chest. Doesn’t quite deny it. “I am not used to having rivals, is all,” he manages, rather lamely.
“Well,” Persephone says, sniffling for effect. “You must accept it eventually.” She bites her lip, a child’s habit holding on with sticky fingers for all her fledgling queendom. “In the meantime, we can strike a truce — if and only if you promise to react with maturity when he curls up on my side of the bed.”
“…Fine,” Hades says, reluctant. She beckons him closer, and Kerberus divides his attention between them, albeit unevenly.
If only he had four heads, Hades thinks, wistfully.
Under the cedar, Artemis cushions her head on Athena’s thighs, stretches out the long, pale lines of her legs to curl her toes in the afternoon sun. The fabric of her khiton slides with the motion, and Athena tries not to look — it’s impolite, for all it’s offered fruit.
Still. Tries is the key word.
She drinks her in, and as she does grey eyes catch greyer ones: the whole world passes between them in that lone gaze. For all she is an omniglot, Athena finds herself breathless at trying to decipher the meaning in it, her lungs heavy, honey-cloyed.
“So,” Artemis says, nonchalant. She licks her lips, reveals sharp, predator teeth.
“So.”
“Tell me a story. Something with a lot of heart.”
Athena’s lips quirk. “The Ulysses kind? Or—“
“—Patroklus,” Artemis cuts, and her sure voice is like mercury, airy and dark. “I’d take the candour of fools over age’s wit, any day, anyplace.”
Athena’s smile widens. She smooths a curl away from the other goddess’ face, and there is no use in pretending it is not a caress, not an unfurl of tenderness. “Yes, I supposed as much.”
For months she’d been picking the ribbons of enstrayed verses from the long hair of the willows, from the places where their green had tangled with that of the river serpents: o Lady, lower the white dove of thy hand / onto my burning brow / and with its cold kiss cleanse and close / my oh-so-wounded fevers.
She twisted this latest offering around her fingers, contemplative. She was used to receiving the affections of poets and of other lyre-men, even those of a priestly ilk; and every now and again an artist of a far-removed kind declared their heart as hers, this all despite the fact that none of them had any clear idea who and what it was they claimed to love. Yet the gentle flame of this one had quickened its root in her heart a little deeper than the others while her head was turned from it, and she was curious to explore her own heat’s meaning.
Thus it was that on a waning night she abandoned herself to the spring herbs sharpening the air, and barefoot walked to where her enigmatic adorator burned — she was hesitant to make use of her chariot. All the stallions would do would be startling the girl’s sleep with the quake of their quiet breath, and she was far too beautiful to wake, curled as she was, a little bird in her burdock nest.
Gentle, Selene brushed the hair from her face, and delighted at her warmth. “I fear,” she said, her voice so soft that the breeze would have stolen it had there been no trees to ward the sound, “That rather than close your fevers I might pinch open new ones — with a kiss, like this…”
