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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!
Indeed. Perhaps Vonnegut should be compulsory reading for all aspiring scientists who might accidentally destroy all life of earth.
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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 just wanted perpetual crown on the rocks and I accidentally the whole planet.
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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?
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
We've fixed it. Its Ice 9.1 now.
Have gnu, will travel.
As snow melts any crud that is on the surface or embedded in the pile collects and makes the surface darker as the pile gets smaller. The clean snow piles that you observed melting more quickly weren't as large or were less dense than the dirty snow piles. I suspect that you probably didn't perform careful observations (as no reasonable, casual observer would) and that if you did you'd soon see that it all makes sense. Also I think you'd find it very difficult to find a clean snow pile in an urban environment. Maybe behind an arena? Even then airborne matter would accumulate on the surface. This happens just about anywhere that snow sits for a long time.
because it isn't snow, it's ice (well, snow is ice, but ice with a lot of air in it.
First off, that black ice? it's shiny. You flash light on it, it reflects it back, it doesn't scatter it. At the right angle, it's bright because you see the shine, but at off angles, you don't get the scatter - so it's still reflecting more light (reducing heat input), though probably not as much as snow.
Which comes to why it is still around. If you freeze a pool of water (or a trickle of water), it become ice, not snow, because it didn't have a high air content while freezing. Snow is created in the atmosphere where there is much more non-water-vapor than water-vapor in the air.
Most of that ice is re-frozen snow (it melts, and sinks, as it sinks, it gets to cooler areas and re-freezes, maybe the sun goes down, and heat input goes down, so it the stuff that was exposed and warming refreezes as well.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Go read it.