Odd rock is an alien

摘要

As if Nobel prizewinning quasicrystals weren't strange enough already, the structures have just got alien status too. New evidence suggests the only known sample of a naturally occurring quasicrystal fell from space. Quasicrystals are orderly, like conventional crystals, but have a more complex form of symmetry. Their discovery in the 1980s in a lab-made material garnered Daniel Shechtman of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa last year's Nobel prize in chemistry.