"The discovery was made serendipitously while Zare and his lab were studying a new, more efficient way to create gold nanostructures in tiny water droplets known as microdroplets. To make those structures, the team added an additional molecule called a reducing agent. As a control test, Zare suggested seeing if they could create gold nanostructures without the reducing agent. Theoretically that should have been impossible, but it
worked anyway – hinting at an as yet undiscovered feature of microdroplet chemistry."
How cool are these accidental discoveries? This is how science most often advances.
