The opal is a gem of magical beauty; in its depths flash brilliant sparks of constantly changing colors that have entranced and fascinated people for centuries. Considered by many to be the most precious of stones, the opal is also the most fragile, and it’s sensitively to light, atmosphere, and temperature has given it an air of unpredictable that has added to its appeal.

“Stones have been known to move and trees to speak,”said Shakespeare’s Macbeth, voicing an old superstition. Today a team of scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle, led by Professor David b F. Rhoades, claim to have evidence that prove that trees really do “talk.’’ Humans cannot hear their conversation, but one can be understood by another.

The first stage in the discovery that alloys have memories came at the beginning of this century. Metallurgists had observed that the hardness of hard steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, is the result of a change in its crystal structure that occurs when the alloys cools down after molding. They named this process of change the marten site phase for the 19th century German metallurgist Adolph Martens. It was subsequently discovered that other alloys assume a marten site phase.