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In January this year, theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt reported how he had traced the Florence rock back to its source – the Listvenitovyi stream in the Koryak mountains in Chukotka, a remote gold-mining region in north-eastern Russia. It turned out that a man named Valery Kryachko had dug up the stuff in 1979 while searching for platinum, and it was eventually smuggled to Florence.Together with nine other scientists from the US, Russia and Italy (and two drivers and a cook), Steinhardt embarked on an expedition across the tundra last July to look for more samples, as I wrote about at the beginning of the year. In a review paper published today in the journal Reports on Progress in Physics, Steinhardt (of Princeton University in New Jersey) and Luca Bindi (a mineralogist at the Florence museum) say their expedition did find new rock fragments containing grains of quasicrystals: solids with a mosaic-like atomic structure that appears to show long-range order but never quite repeats its arrangement. And the evidence further backs up their January report that these quasicrystals appear to come from a meteorite some 4.5 billion years old. Rocks found around the site suggest the meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite, landed on Earth before or during the last ice age, 15,000 years ago.  Read more