When you think crystals,
you probably think of flashy rocks behind
glass in a natural history museum,
but crystal forms are incredibly diverse
and can be found in your kitchen
and even inside your very own body.
2014 marks the international year of crystallography,
so in its honor,
we’ve put together a list of five crystal  facts,
and you’d better believe
they’re going to rock your world.
But first, let’s run through exactly
what a crystal is?
In short, a crystal is a uniformed
material with a really consistent
internal molecular structure.
Deep down inside a crystal you’ll see
a very unique arrangement of molecules and atoms
in a structure called crystal lattice.
When you think lattice, think cage.
Salt started the science.
Let’s start with a very famous crystal: salt.
What makes salt stand out?
It started the crystal craze.
Father and son duo Henry and Lawrence Bragg
wanted to know how salt formed.
In 1913, they used x-rays to figure out
what crystal structures look like.
For this, they won the 1915 Nobel Prize
and kicked off a completely new field of science.
Hats off to you team Bragg!
But why no Nobel Prize for whoever
discovered putting salt on French fries?
There is a crystal even stronger than diamonds.
Diamonds are tough,
but there’s one crystal that’s even tougher.
Wurtzite Boron Nitride is shaped
very similar to diamond, except
instead of carbon atoms,
it’s made up of boron and nitrogen.
What makes it such a strong crystal is
that when great stress is applied to it,
the molecular bonds that keep it together
have the ability to reorient
themselves to relieve tension.
While diamonds also do this, a Boron Nitride
crystal ends up being about 80% stronger.
DNA is a crystal structure.
If you paid attention in biology class
you learned that Watson and Crick discovered
the structure of DNA in 1953.
It even won them a Nobel Prize.
But it might not have happened without the
help of crystallographer Rosalind Franklin.
Franklin’s work in x-ray diffraction
helped prove their theoretical models,
leading to one of the most important
scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
Earth’s largest crystals are also found in drywall
The crystal cave of Mexico,
deep below the Naica Mountain in the
Chihuahuan Desert, is filled with some of
the largest known crystal structures on Earth.
Primarily made of gypsum – the same stuff
used to make drywall – these crystals range
up to 36 feet tall and can weigh up to 55 tons.
The most expensive diamond on Earth is pink.
The pink star diamond is the most
expensive diamond on the planet, per carat.
But before we get to the astronomical numbers,
you might be wondering what exactly a carat is.
Well it’s simple.
A carat is a unit of measurement for precious
stones that equals 200mg.
So, one carat of the Pink Star Diamond
is worth $1,395,761, or $6,972.81 cents
per milligram of diamond.
This shiny little rock here, yeah, it’s worth
over $83,000,000, and it’s 59.6 carat size.
Crystallography has brought on an incredible scope
of discoveries over the past centuries,
so make sure to check down in
the video description for a list
of C&EN’s favorite crystal structures.
If you’ve got any chemistry questions,
leave it in the comments or find us
on Facebook and Twitter at acsreactions.
