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New Ice Structure Could Help Seed Clouds, Cause Rain
ScienceDaily is reporting that a new ice chain structure may provide a better method for seeding clouds and causing rain. "Ice structures are usually built out of simple hexagonal arrangements of water molecules and this hexagonal building block motif is easily observed in the structures of snowflakes. However, during their studies Dr Angelos Michaelides and co-workers from the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, and the University of Liverpool have discovered a natural nanoscale ice structure formed of pentagons."
Holy Bokonon! It's the end of the world!
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
A science fiction history about ice that is stable at room temperatura, so iceize the adjacent water. Causing the apocalipsys wen one piece of ice9 accidentally touch the sea.
-Woof woof woof!
I can see on the tags that I am not the only one who thought so
In soviet russia, the pentagon snows on YOU.
FTFA - "Snow is made of hexagons. We changed it up and used fucking PENTAGONS."
Won't someone think of the children who on the way to school will be pelted
with snowballs of an ever increasing diameter?
I'm off to make fire hotter using a goddamn nano-rhombus. Donations for science anyone?
Maybe I just don't understand the subject enough but from TFA "... there is no a priori rule that hexagons should form... and when people are searching for new ice nucleating agents which can be used to seed clouds and cause rain, they do not necessarily need to focus on materials that have hexagonal surfaces - other types of surfaces may be good too."
Nowhere do I see a claim that this pentagonal structure is superior, just that this opens up the potential that there are other structures as well and that one yet undiscovered structure could be beneficial for cloud seeding.
I can't believe you don't know what a Hasemalphaginnojinglanaporphomism is.
Yet another form of Ice to add the existing 16-odd arrangements.
I thought the real problem with global warming was humans CAUSING it. We were CAUSING the change and making it bad. How is involvment it CREATING clouds and making it rain any better. Sounds worse to me.
We need to stop trying to shape infinitly complex systems we do not understand, because there WILL be unintended consequences.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
er, no. just replace butterfly with mouse fart and you get the same thing.
farting mouse, PM with heartburn, Oh Canada! and bad tribal tattoos in Mozambique.
Sent from your iPad.
The Fed's are quick to regulate what we can put into the atmosphere, but would they care what we took out? That is until it started changing the climates for their constituents.
I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy. http://stewartlee.org
Shouldn't it have been:
Pentagon may control weather!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Perhaps it isn't Vonnegut so much as Ursula LeGuin we should look to here. You can't cast a light without creating a shadow. Do we know that creating rain somewhere will not cause drought elsewhere?
As in the symbol often associated with Witchcraft and Devil worship?!
I've often said, "Go to H***!" to people who bother me. Perhaps I should say, "Go to Heaven!" instead?
I think to say that Science Daily does any reporting is stretching the definition of reporting a bit much. I think "rewritten from a press release" is more like it.
If you want a real news piece, with real reporting, check out the article on the same paper over at New Scientist. They actually talked with the scientist involved in the study (and one that wasn't).
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Please, just do not let it drop into the river, lake or ocean!!!
Quite dumb-proof, isn't it? :)
_____________
Btw, its ice-nine by Kurt Vonegut if anybody is wondering.
hany
initiallty. However ice would reflect light, cooling the earth...
As I look out at the ugly piles of black, dirt encrusted ice, I have to wonder: If white reflects heat, and black absorbs it, why is it that the big piles of white snow are long since melted away, and the big piles of dirty black snow are still here?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
How long till the "pentawater" people seize on this as "proof" of their unfounded claims about their bottled magic-water?
(Slightly related - UK slashdotters can sign a petition to protest OfQuack (aka CNHC) certifying unproven Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine procedures.)
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Somewhere in here there's a joke about pentagonal snowballs in hell and the end of the world. I just can't make it coalesce.
We've fixed it. Its Ice 9.1 now.
Have gnu, will travel.
Isn't continual rain something that happened in Bladerunner? Do we have to buy those lightup umbrellas now? They started being sold recently on thinkgeek. Coincidence? I think not.
"...natural nanoscale ice structure formed of pentagons."
Cripes, an entire structure full of Pentagons? We've got ONE and look how much it costs! Hold on to your wallets...
All this makes me think of Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series and how the new inhabitants of the space vessel manage to screw things up completely, because they put short term personal needs before the balance of the system.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Don't they know the Ancient Ones are confined to the center of the Pentagon? Now they'll make their escape, one tiny piece at a time!
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
What a great idea... Let's take ice, drop it from the sky, and tell people as it melts that we've created rain!!!
You're still going? I kinda like your sense of purpose. It's admirable, if wasted.
We oughta meet for coffee, crazy people seem to like me a lot.
This relates to a one-dimensional crystal forming on a flat surface.
I wonder if it's related to the early stages of frost formation on windows, where needles of ice form rapidly on the surface before the ice fills in between them?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So how long is it going to be before lots of overpaid lawyers sue the cloud-seeders on the grounds that the communities downwind "own" the rain? Think that's crazy? Try telling that to the communities fighting for the right to put wells in local aquifers against the people way way WAY downstream who think all of the water upstream is theirs.
Do we know that creating rain somewhere will not cause drought elsewhere?
I have heard that it was fear of lawsuits from people downwind, over moisture removed from the air by cloud seeding to create rain on land upwind that otherwise would have ended up as rain on THEIR land, which ended the experiments with cloud seeding to aid agriculture in the USA.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So how long is it going to be before lots of overpaid lawyers sue the cloud-seeders on the grounds that the communities downwind "own" the rain?
I heard (I think it was in a meteorology class back in the '60s) that the early plans for cloud seeding as an agricultural tool had been scrapped for exactly this reason: Concern that the downwind farmers would sue those upwind who used cloud seeding for denying them the moisture that otherwise might have ended up as rain on THEIR fields.
Water rights are a BIG DEAL for farmers. Cloud seeding doesn't put any more water into the air. When it works at all (the conditions must be right) it just makes the water fall out sooner/faster than it would have on its own. So the downwind farmers would have a valid point about the upwind operation "stealing their water".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
natural nanoscale ice structure formed of pentagons.
Not more Pentagons! The one just south of Washington, D.C., is more than enough!
If the ice crystals are pentagonal, they will form pentagonal snowflakes. This will give us a better chance of finding the snowflake with magic properties depicted on page 00062 of the Principia Discordia.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan