 A lot of materials in nature are crystalline, almost all metals are crystals, most ceramics are crystals and pretty much all semiconductors are also crystals. So all the materials that we find in our daily lives, if you look at them at a very microscopic scale it turns out that they are crystals. All computers and in fact all cell phones have semiconductor crystals inside of them. So the cell phone that you probably have on you or near you, that has a semiconductor crystal inside of it. Scientists have been trying to optimize these crystallization processes for many, many years, you know probably half a century. What scientists do is they study all these different kind of crystal growth parameters to optimize the specific kind of crystal that they want to grow. In many cases you want the crystal to be a very high structural quality, you don't want any defects in the crystals, many classes of crystals grow better in microgravity. I wouldn't say all crystals would necessarily grow better in microgravity. All depends on the specific technique that you're wanting to use, people go on the space station to figure out how to grow crystals better than they can on Earth. It's pretty much used as sort of a laboratory to understand the crystallization process and then by learning those different things then they get applied on Earth. In metal crystals people make turbine blades, turbine blades are used in the engines of jets. Semiconductor crystals are used for like electronic devices and in computers and also as detectors. So these detectors are used for example for x-rays. Another kind of detector would be say optical crystals. So these optical crystals are also semiconductor crystals and they're used in lasers and so lasers are used very widely. Every time you go and buy food at your local grocery store there's usually a scanner there that uses a laser. The world would be a very very different place if we didn't have crystals.