This is interesting. NASA scientists are examining a seemingly magical way to produce high-quality crystals.

Perhaps a NASA laboratory is an unlikely setting for a magic show. Nevertheless, this is where Frank Szofran and colleagues are growing high-quality crystals using a method as amazing as any conjuring trick. By carefully cooling a molten germanium-silicon mixture inside a cylindrical container, they coax it into forming a single large and extraordinarily well-ordered crystal. Such crystals have very few defects because, remarkably, they never touched the walls of the very container in which they grew.