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Scientists Create a New Form of Matter: Superionic Water Ice (sciencemag.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the best-of-both-worlds dept.

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."

18 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. One step closer... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Funny

    To Ice 9, and then we are all fucked.

    1. Re:One step closer... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Funny

      Or they could have a very full cup of Ice 9 suspended above the ocean via a ramshackle contraption maintained by a team of tweakers with shaky hands and stained lab coats and point out what a catastrophe it would be if any escaped and raise funds to improve their containment.

      The Indiegogo video would have a cool animation of the Ice 9 apocalypse happening should containment fail. An investigative reporter would grill the scientists, all of whom would seem to be completely loopy. The scientists would point out the great but ill defined promise of the research 'free energy! a cure for cancer!'. When shown the animation of the catastrophe the scientists would find it hard to hide their glee at the POWER of heir work, some going full on Davros. The reporter would end with 'You spent some much time thinking how you could do it you didn't think to ask if you should'.

      Ice 9 - Next on SyFy!

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  2. 4th Phase of Water by js290 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Fourth Phase of Water: Dr. Gerald Pollack at TEDxGuelphU https://youtu.be/i-T7tCMUDXU

    --
    "Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
    1. Re:4th Phase of Water by Errol+backfiring · · Score: 4, Funny

      Every German knows that the fourth phase of water is Dutch tomatoes.

      --
      Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
    2. Re:4th Phase of Water by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2

      It would be the fifth phase after ice, liquid, vapour and plasma. Unless you want to argue it is not water plasma but a mix of oxygen and hydrogen plasma.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  3. Sounds like a movie. by CptLoRes · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let's compress water between some diamonds to extreme pressure and see what happens.. Nothing, now what? Fire the laser at it!

    1. Re:Sounds like a movie. by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Funny

      Let's compress water between some diamonds to extreme pressure and see what happens.. Nothing, now what? Fire the laser at it!

      Sharks in lab coats. We live in interesting times.

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    2. Re:Sounds like a movie. by sg_oneill · · Score: 5, Funny

      Revised definition of science;-

      "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment and........... ah fuck it, fire some lasers at it"

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    3. Re:Sounds like a movie. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      (Shamelessly stolen from some message board)

      Spheres of Science

      Chemistry - A natural science that can be broken down into two major categories: "blowing stuff up" and "making drugs"

      Physicist - An atom's way of knowing about atoms.

      Research - What you are doing when you don't know what you are doing.

      Engineer - A person who solves problems that you didn't know you had, using methods you do not understand.

      Programmer - An organism that most efficiently converts caffeine and pizza into software.

  4. The meaning of this? by KingAlanI · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It seems like this could be useful for studying Uranus and Neptune as well for potential innovations in materials science.

    --
    I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
    1. Re:The meaning of this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  5. Science! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hundreds of thousands of PSI, squashing things between diamonds, and then exploding all of it with lasers.
    There is nothing in that summary that isn't utterly badass.

  6. misread title by advocate_one · · Score: 5, Informative
    I took it to be 'supersonic' water ice...

    anyway, here's a link to the real article which OP neglected to use

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  7. Wooder Ice by Bohnanza · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not as good as Rita's

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    Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.

  8. Are there any practical applications for this.... by mark-t · · Score: 2

    ... beyond just sounding effing cool?

    Or is this one of those really neat sciency things that people figure may someday learn some practical application for but for the moment and the foreseeable future, nobody has any idea what we could actually do with this that will be actually useful?

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  9. Re:Are there any practical applications for this.. by crow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. Re:Are there any practical applications for this.. by slew · · Score: 2

    ... beyond just sounding effing cool?

    Or is this one of those really neat sciency things that people figure may someday learn some practical application for but for the moment and the foreseeable future, nobody has any idea what we could actually do with this that will be actually useful?

    Proton conductors (one of the properties of this super-ionic ice) appear to be used by sharks and rays for remote sensing. Specifically, the proton conductor (keratan sulfate) is present in a jelly-like membrane and appears to enable sensing of electric and magnetic fields in water w/o being electrically conductive.

    A more industrial proton conductor called Nafion has been a used for proton-exchange Fuel Cells. Currently proton-exchange fuels cells are limited to lower temperatures because of the limitations of Nafion.

    Proton conduction also is important in photosynthesis.

    Maybe there's some future application to these areas, but it seems the environmental conditions to create this stuff are quite extreme for anything on earth... Perhaps the conditions on distant icy planets might mean that some alien life-form based some photosynthesis processes or perhaps some hydrogen energy cycle on something like this? Could be part of a sci-fi short story? Who knows...

  11. Re:Just asking by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Water is said to have "low compressibility", but still it is compressible. Sound wouldn't travel in water were that not the case. Amazing though that at 4 km of depth with 400 atmospheres of pressure, water compresses less than 2 percent!