Quartz might help solve a mystery as to why Earth's continents repeatedly deform in some areas but not others, scientists find. Areas loaded with the common fragile mineral apparently make up ...

Living under a translucent rock can be quite comfortable -- if you're a moss in the Mojave Desert. A graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, found that some mosses in the ...

Microscopic Mojave Desert plants growing on the underside of translucent quartz pebbles can endure both chilly and near-boiling temperatures, scavenge nitrogen from the air, and utilize the equivalent ...

Syntrichia caninervis, one of the most common Mojave Desert mosses, growing on the soil under a white milky quartz rock. Credit: Kirsten Fisher Desert mosses live a much different life than their ...

Traditional CCD-based EBSD detectors can analyze metals and alloys with speeds higher than 1000 indexed patterns per second (pps), however their ability to acquire data from geological samples has ...

You might have heard of clear quartz-like crystals, Microcrystalline quartz. It is a special kind of quartz that forms in tiny crystals, so small that you usually need a microscope to see them. These ...

Desert conditions are harsh, and mosses often spend much of the year in a dormant condition, desiccated and brown, until rain comes. Researchers discovered two species of moss that found a hiding ...