For my senior thesis in George Scherer's lab, I was investigating the best way to dry cement without doing any damage to the cement's microstructure. I tried drying cement samples in both a desiccator and a 105 degree Celsius oven. The oven-dried samples had hundreds, even thousands, of these cement "flowers," with noticeable "petals" and "buds." The width of this flower is approximately four microns.