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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."

8 of 62 comments (clear)

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

    To Ice 9, and then we are all fucked.

  2. 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 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. 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.

  4. 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.
  5. Re:4th Phase of Water by Errol+backfiring · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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    Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
  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: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!