You might have seen sped-up videos of how some crystals form. Maybe you did the famous experiment of putting a metal ring in a solution rich in salt, and saw little crystals forming on it. Water is a great medium to see crystals form. But crystals form in a variety of conditions and liquids, even in liquid metal, and not all of them are transparent like water. Now, researchers have developed a way to see crystal formation in opaque fluids. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The team used X-rays to study the formation of platinum crystals in liquid metal. They took platinum beads and dissolved them in gallium or gallium-indium liquid metal at 500°C (932°F). That’s less than one-third of the melting point of platinum, bu

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