There's lots of science fiction stories about a single molecule being able to "infect" other matter. Ice-nine, grey goop stories, Borg/Cyberman nanoparticles, Strange matter etc...
But this is real, and scary. A particular crystalisation of an HIV drug was able to "infect" labs and production plants, making the drug useless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PccOwGEbtQU
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@_thegeoff The wikipedia article is fascinating reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph
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@artandtechnic We use phenyl salicylate to show different crystal sizes depending on cooling rate at high school level. It's really easy to supercool it, so when that happens I can just drop a tiny crystal of the original in and we get a nice rapid nucleation. But I'm now going to have nightmares about the day that experiment never works again... 😳
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