with quartz being one of the main crystals they focused on. Piezoelectricity first proved its utility in World War I, with submarine warfare and the need for ultrasonic transducers for sonar.

In a paper published Monday in Nature Geoscience, geologists in Australia write that piezoelectricity is the secret to quartz ...

Piezoelectricity—a crystal can generate a tiny electric charge when its atomic structure is squeezed strong enough—occurs in many minerals but is particularly strong in quartz. What if this ...

Thus, piezoelectricity may be a universal property of living tissue, and may play a significant part in several physiological phenomena ...