Those damned scientists are at it again – ushering in the destruction of man by heedlessly pursuing the creation of the very devices which science fiction authors have been warning us again for decades. This time, science has regrettably taken the next step towards the production of the doomsday material Ice-nine.
Scientists at the Sandia National Laboratories have discovered a way to turn ice into water in just nanoseconds, leaving the ice hotter than boiling water. What’s more, counting liquid, frozen ice, and steam, these scientists claim that ice has a full eleven types or phases … not that we’ll get to see more than the first nine, mind you. Nine is where Vonnegut predicts the world ends in his classic masterpiece, “Cat’s Cradle”.
From the original article:
The experiment was done at the Sandia National Laboratories’ huge Z machine, which generates temperatures hotter than the sun (setting a record here on Earth) and where researchers test what we know about those plain vanilla “phases” in textbooks: solid, liquid and gas.
“The three phases of water as we know them—cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor—are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states,” said Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. “Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase [ice] than maintain the more energetic liquid phase [water].”
Ice is odd. Most things shrink when they get cold, and so they take up less space as solids than as liquids. But regular ice, of course, takes up more space than water. A simple experiment of putting a (preferably cheap) full water bottle in the freeze overnight will demonstrate this.
In the new experiment, however, the volume of “water shrank abruptly and discontinuously, consistent with the formation of almost every known form of ice except the ordinary kind,” according to a Sandia statement Thursday.
Apparently, there are at least 11 other types of ice that most of us don’t know about. They’re classified by how they behave at certain temperatures and pressures. You might have heard of one: Supercooled water can be below 32 degrees but not frozen.
Problem is, scientists don’t know the specifics of all these states. Hence the Sandia research.
Read the Entire Article…
Source: Live Science
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