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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 01 2016, @07:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-is-it-still-wet dept.

Water freezes at 0° C (32° F) and boils at 100° C (212° F) at sea level, right? Normally, yes. But researchers at MIT have found that, when contained inside the tiny cavities of carbon nanotubes, water can actually freeze solid at temperatures well above its usual boiling point. This finding may have applications in creating proton-conducting "ice wires".

Temperature alone isn't the sole factor in determining when water shifts between a solid, liquid and gas. As demonstrated in a Cody's Lab video, pressure plays a big part as well, allowing water to effectively be boiled until it freezes by lowering the pressure.

Water has also been known to behave strangely when it's confined to spaces on the scale of nanometers: earlier this year scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab discovered water has a freaky fourth state of matter when it's put under extreme pressure in these tiny spaces. And research as far back as the 1990s has observed water spontaneously vaporizing when it's tightly surrounded by hydrophobic materials – a phenomenon seen when scientists accidentally created nanorods that appear to harvest water from the air.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @03:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @03:07PM (#435958)

    And now what to you use to remove the frozen blood and magically keep it from reverting to a liquid, so you can freeze more blood...