Crystals that looks like city maps – Frozen project

Apr 05, 2015 • 12:16 AM UTC

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140x Magnification

Plants

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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Here is another entry inspired by the “Frozen Project” started by a fantastic pair of Foldscope contributors. Thank you for initiating such a fascinating series. Search “frozen” project on the website to get links for all the original posts (now a series of 6 posts).
This time, I accidentally made my own little crystals. I image a lot of marine life forms and many a times the sea water I put on the glass slide will start evaporating early leaving these salt trails/deposits behind. I decided to take a closer look – and to my surprise; I saw tiny “city maps” – or at least they look like city maps.
Method:
1. Take a drop of sea water and put it on a glass slide.
2. Let it evaporate until everything has dried out.
3. I images the slide with no cover slip using my foldscope 140x. On iphone 5.
What’s most fascinating to me is clearly the 90deg angles between growth curves. Take a look yourself to see what you think..

This one has an appeal of a beautiful coast line. You can clearly notice the fractal structure embedded in the crystals – where they are recursive in nature. The same structure repeats over and over again.

Next; I will try to explain clearly why this recursive structure is so common in drying water based crystallization process.
Cheers
Manu
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