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Scientists Create a New Form of Matter: Superionic Water Ice (sciencemag.org)
According to The New York Times, scientists created a new form of water that simultaneously acts like a solid and liquid. "The substance, which consists of a fluid of hydrogen ions running through a lattice of oxygen, was formed by compressing water between two diamonds and then zapping it with a laser," reports Science Magazine. "That caused pressures to spike to more than a million times those of Earth's atmosphere and temperatures to rise to thousands of degrees, conditions scientists had predicted may lead to the formation of superionic ice. This kind of water doesn't exist naturally on Earth, the scientists report in Nature Physics, but it may be present in the mantles of icy planets like Neptune and Uranus."
What would be really neat is if they could get enough data out of it to do a uranus/neptune life sim and see what emerges. We've already seen life organize from pools of nucleic acid in a lab environment in a few 100k generations (or maybe I'm off by one order of magnitude), but anyway, modern computer clusters can handle 10e20 generations in short work these days, so long as your input conditions are precise enough.
This allows scientists to study new forms of matter. This means better calibrating the models that predicted this, and a better understanding of exactly what is going on. Whether this particular form of matter is ever useful or not, the improved understanding may lead to forms of matter that are quite useful.