[mvanga]

Can anyone more knowledgeable comment on the details and significance of the comment regarding the frequency of formation being a normal distribution?

> Straight away, they noticed a statistical pattern in the frequency at which the crystals emerged; it followed what’s known as a normal distribution, which has long been theorized but only now experimentally verified.

[blt]

I am also wondering about this. Normal distributions have support on all real numbers, which would imply that negative frequencies have nonzero probability. That is strange. Perhaps the underlying mechanism is more faithfully modeled by another distribution with nonnegative support, but due to the central limit theorem it is well-approximated by a normal distribution.