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Since modern crystallography dawned with X-ray diffraction experiments on crystals by Max von Laue in 1912 and William and Lawrence Bragg (a father-and-son team) in 1913, and was recognized by Nobel prizes in physics for von Laue in 1914 and the Braggs in 1915, the discipline has informed almost every branch of the natural sciences. This Nature special issue explores the highlights, evolution and future of the field. And in July 2014, NPG will publish Nature Milestones: Crystallography to further celebrate the International Year of Crystallography

Credit: Diego Sanz; (inset) iStockphoto BALTIMORE, MARYLAND—There's nothing like suddenly going blind to spoil a good happy hour. Alcoholic beverages tainted with poisonous methanol are a scourge of the developing world, causing blindness and even death. The dangerous drinks can come from botched batches of home-distilled liquor, but they often have a more sinister origin; criminal gangs will cut standard alcohols with methanol and sell the resulting concoctions to unassuming customers for inflated profits. Because adding methanol doesn't change the drink's flavor, color, or smell, there's no easy way to tell if the brew you're about to imbibe could...

With the climate change debate as heated as ever, how do scientists reconstruct what the weather was like in the past? Jon Evans looks at the detective chemistry behind such environmental forensic work © Pete Bucktrout/British Antarctic SurveyThe Earth is not particularly good at keeping records, especially of its past climate. Like those of a disorganised businessman, its climate records are difficult to find, hard to interpret and often contradictory. But like diligent auditors, scientists are making great efforts to get to the bottom of the Earth’s disorganised records, both to understand how the Earth’s climate behaved in the past...

Credit: NASA; (inset) Chi M. Phan Two years ago, the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig covered hundreds of square miles of the Gulf of Mexico with oil (main image). The oil floated because it is less dense, and therefore lighter, than water. But now scientists say that water can sometimes float on oil—and their findings, which were published last month in Langmuir, could help to mop up oil slicks like the one created by the 2010 disaster. Using a theoretical model, the scientists calculated the forces acting on water when it is dripped onto an oil surface....

Charges build up due to exchange of material, study suggests A balloon rubbed against the head can be both a hair-raising and a hair-tearing experience, a new study suggests. Clumps of balloon and hair invisible to the naked eye may break off each object during contact and stick to the other. The existence of this exchange could challenge traditional theories about how static electricity builds up, a process known as contact electrification. “The basic assumptions people have made about contact electrification are wrong,” says Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He and his colleagues describe...

Where sea meets sky, there are lots of water molecules with an identity crisis. About a quarter of the H2O in water’s uppermost layer can’t decide whether to be liquid or gas: One hydrogen atom stays in the drink while the other pokes up, vibrating in the air. This layer of molecular ambiguity is extremely thin and has little or no effect on the water below it, new data reported June 9 in Nature show. Right beneath the liquid’s surface, water molecules go about their business just as if the air weren’t there. That may seem like a dull discovery,...

Sensors based on single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNTs) could be 'reset' at the simple flick of a switch, say researchers in the US. The team found that organic molecules bound to the nanotube surface are shaken off when an electric current is passed through the material, resetting the sensor ready for further use.SWNTs can be used in very small, highly sensitive chemical sensors for a variety of gases and other chemicals. The SWNTs, attached to a silicon substrate, absorb chemicals onto their surface, however many chemicals are irreversibly absorbed resulting in lengthy processes before the sensor can be reused.Richard Masel and colleagues at...

Our understanding of life and technology at extreme temperatures could become clearer thanks to a microfluidic device that studies ice formation. The new instrument studies ice formation in supercooled water George Whitesides, at Harvard University, Cambridge, US, and colleagues have developed a microfluidic device that produces supercooled water drops (droplets that remain liquid below 0 °C) and measures the temperature at which ice nucleates in them. The device is two orders of magnitude faster that current state-of-the-art ice nucleation instruments and very accurate, claims the team.Ice nucleation controls water's freezing process. Studying how water behaves is important for our comprehension...