The best way to understand glass is to understand how it is made. The first step to make glass requires heating up a mixture of minerals – often soda ash, limestone and quartz sand – until they melt ...

In the remote desert of western Egypt, near the Libyan border, lie clues to an ancient cosmic cataclysm. Libyan desert glass is the name given to fragments of canary-yellow glass found scattered over ...

Researchers discover how molecules in ancient glass rearrange and recombine with minerals over centuries to form a patina of photonic crystals -- ordered arrangements of atoms that filter and reflect ...

Some 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome, glass vessels carrying wine or water, or perhaps an exotic perfumes, tumble from a table in a marketplace, and shatter to pieces on the street. As centuries ...