Quasi-Crystals -- Made Only in the Furnaces of Nuclear Blasts... AMAZING. H/T Roger Penrose: Tangent...

The long ago inner-miner of my youth, is forever looking down, as I walk nature's manifold trails. . . looking, at the rocks my foot just might scuff free, from the earth. This would be -- at right (in my fondest dreams), what I might have once been lucky enough. . . to kick free.

Here's the story -- from the journal Nature, from early this morning:

. . .In the aftermath of the Trinity test -- the first ever detonation of a nuclear bomb, which took place on 16 July 1945 at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing Range -- researchers found a vast field of greenish glassy material that had formed from the liquefaction of desert sand. They dubbed this trinitite.

The plutonium bomb had been detonated on top of a 30-metre-high tower, which was laden with sensors and their cables. As a result, some of the trinitite that formed had reddish inclusions, says Steinhardt. “It was a fusion of natural material with copper from the transmission lines.” Quasicrystals often form from elements that would not normally combine, so Steinhardt and his colleagues thought samples of the red trinitite would be a good place to look for quasicrystals. . . .

The previously unknown structure [at right], made of iron, silicon, copper and calcium, probably formed from the fusion of vaporized desert sand and copper cables. Similar materials have been synthesized in the laboratory and identified in meteorites, but this one, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 17 May, is the first example of a quasicrystal with this combination of elements. . . .

I go now, off to bed; the sheets are chanting my name, sweet and low -- but chanting just the same. . . be excellent to one and all you meet tomorrow -- and every day, hence.

नमस्ते