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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."

13 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!
  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"

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      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. 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.

  5. 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.
  6. Wooder Ice by Bohnanza · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Not as good as Rita's

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    Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.

  7. 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.

  8. 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!