Only a handful of quasicrystals—structures that sit somewhere between crystals and glasses—have been discovered outside of the laboratory. The first was identified in a meteorite and is thought to have been created during a high-velocity impact event. Another turned up in a 2021 study of debris from the site of the world’s first nuclear explosion, which took place in 1945 in New Mexico. Now researchers have found a new quasicrystal in an equally quirky location—a sand dune in Nebraska—with a similarly powerful generation mechanism: the high-intensity electrical discharge of a lightning strike [1].
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