Science Friday talked with Caltech Physicist Ken Libbrecht about his experimental snowflake machine, which can crystallize individual snowflakes to see how different conditions change how ...

To explain why snowflakes look the way they do, we first need to understand how they form.

Snowflakes form when water vapor travels through the air and condenses on a particle. This begins to form a slowly growing ice crystal--a snowflake! There are two basic ways that the vapor can ...

A: A snowflake begins to form when an extremely cold water droplet freezes onto a pollen or dust particle in the sky. This creates an ice crystal. As the ice crystal falls to the ground, water ...