Kickstart this Quasicrystal Comic

A while back, I featured crystallographer Veronica Berns in a series of posts about the wacky world of x-ray crystallography. In the comic, I mentioned her work involved incredibly complex materials that I would have to get to in another comic. Thankfully, I won’t have to do that, because you can learn all about quasicrystals from Veronica herself.

In an effort to make her research understandable by her friends and family, Veronica turned her doctoral thesis into a comic book which she is crowd funding on Kickstarter. Titled, Atomic Size Matters, the comic serves as an introduction to solid state chemistry, its history, and its future applications. I had a chance to read an early draft last year, and I was impressed by how well she was able to guide the reader through her work step by step. I went into it knowing basically nothing about quasicrystals, and left with a new appreciation for them.

As of the writing of this post, Atomic Size Matters has not only been funded, but has exceeded its original goal. You can pledge to get your copy at the project page here.

This isn’t the first time science went crowdsource, back in 2012, Princeton University research fellow Ethan Perlstein used Rockethub to raise over $25,000 for his work in studying how amphetamines and methamphetamines interact with the brain and metal illnesses.