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Q&A: The snowflake designer

For the past decade, physicist Kenneth Libbrecht has been studying how ice crystals form, taking thousands of photographs of their intricate structures. He describes how he grows snowflakes in his lab at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and never tires of tracking the real thing in the far north.

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  1. 1Artificial snowflakes are at bottom left and top right.

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Interview by Jascha Hoffman

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Hoffman, J. Q&A: The snowflake designer. Nature 480, 453–454 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/480453a

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  1. The constitutive component of what you say ice flakes is the not the one and only water. What will be the shape of ice crystal depend on many things like the substratum on which water molecules assembles in a specific shape by hydrogen bonding, air flow speed, air direction, air composition, pollutant present in aerial environment, other small ionic and nonionic molecules present in water, the ambient temperature, humidity percentage, and the ambient pH of this whole composition, and many more factor may be in principle. It is very difficult to replicate same flake shape composition every time in the laboratory. In nature may find your flakes as it is an open system but for what; mahlaranjeet@gmail.com, CCMB, Hyderabad.

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