... ) has flatter surfaces and does not readily combine with hydrogen. Cluster research is embryonic, with new surprises popping up almost every day. Once a cluster size exceeds a few hundred atoms, its properties begin to resemble those of the bulk material. However, "cluster-assembled materials" have been made by attaching clusterto-cluster in a sort of patchwork quilt. Such materials have unique properties that are quite different from those of the normal crystalline and amorphous materials. (Pool, Robert; "Clusters: Strange Morsels of Matter," Science, 248:1186, 1990.) Comment. One would expect that the effects of clustering would be important in biology, too. We obviously have a lot to learn about this new realm between single atoms/molecules and bulk materials. Quasicrystals . Quasicrystals, once considered physically impossible, have been found easy to grow -- once one's mindset is corrected. At Bell Labs, for example, quasicrystals of an aluminum-cobaltcopper alloy reveal atoms packed together in pentagonal arrays -- the very geometry that crystallographers assured us could not exist. As one of the Bell researchers remarked, "Most of the ap plications are unimagined." This goes for the basic properties of quasicrystals, too. (Keller, John J.; "Bell Labs Confirms That New Form of Matter Exists," Wall Street Journal, February 8, 1990. Cr. J. Covey.) Nitrogen molecules that shouldn't exist . "Chemists in West Germany have discovered a compound of nitrogen which breaks one of the fundamental rules of ...