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Diamond is the hardest natural material on Earth and, struck at the wrong angle with a hammer, will still shatter.

Rotate certain gemstones and, instead of staying one color, they visibly shift, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically enough that the same

Break a piece of quartz, obsidian, or ordinary glass and you’ll often get the same distinctive result: smooth, curved surfaces

Move a tiger’s eye cabochon under a single light source and a bright line seems to glide smoothly across its

Set a clear rhombohedron of calcite over a printed line of text and, instead of one line, you’ll see two,

Pick up two similarly sized rocks and one will often feel noticeably heavier, a difference that’s not really about size

A mineral’s color on the outside and the color it leaves behind when crushed to powder aren’t always the same

“Shiny” isn’t precise enough for mineral identification, and mineralogists settled on a specific vocabulary for exactly how a mineral’s surface

Break two different minerals and you’ll often get two completely different results: one splits along a flat, mirror-smooth plane, the

Every crystalline mineral on Earth, thousands of species, organizes into just seven basic geometric families, called crystal systems. It’s one