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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday March 28 2015, @11:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-wonders-never-cease dept.

As if graphene needed any more strange and wonderful properties to recommend its study, it has been shown that sandwiching water between two layers of graphene causes the water to form ice at room temperature:

An international team of scientists recently discovered some intriguing structural characteristics of water confined in graphene nanocapillaries. In these studies, the researchers deposited a graphene monolayer on a small grid, added a small amount of water, and then covered it with another monolayer of graphene. This sample was left overnight to allow excess water to evaporate, eventually bringing the graphene layers together so that only a small amount of adsorbed water remained between them. The water left behind showed some unusual structural properties.

[...] The water molecules formed layers with square lattices where each molecule interacted with the four molecules surrounding it, forming hydrogen bonds at 90° angles. This square lattice symmetry, which they also saw assembled into bilayers and trilayers, is strikingly different from the normal three-dimensional arrangement in ice, where hydrogen bonds exhibit a bond angle of approximately 109°. The researchers found that this lattice structure could be produced even after certain variables had been changed, including the capillary width, applied pressure, and rigidity of the graphene sheets.

Fascinating stuff. Wouldn't it be wonderful to mine it from the air and spin it into sheets and ropes and anything at all?

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @11:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @11:51PM (#163671)

    Merican Bama lovers demand to know how this new tech can be used to kill Mooslims.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by _1156277 on Saturday March 28 2015, @11:56PM

    by _1156277 (5139) on Saturday March 28 2015, @11:56PM (#163673)

    The headline calls it ice then the summary admits the properties are different from those of ice.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:27AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:27AM (#163679)

      New! Improved! It's like ice, except it's better! It's genuine Iceen™! Patent Pending.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by MrGuy on Sunday March 29 2015, @01:14AM

      by MrGuy (1007) on Sunday March 29 2015, @01:14AM (#163685)

      What they have is a solid, crystaline form of water. All such forms of water are generally referred to as ice.

      While water overwhelmingly tends to form a specific type of crystal in nature (referred to as Ice I), there are seventeen different stable crystaline forms of water [wikipedia.org], which are generally designated as Ice I-Ice XVI (with two variants on Ice I). The ice you're familiar with is generally Ice I-c.

      What they've either found here is a room-temperature process for producing one of the other known variants of ice, or an eighteenth stable Ice. It's not obvious to be from TFA, but I'm guessing it's the former (probably Ice I-h).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:12AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:12AM (#163690)

        Wikipedia says I-h is the "normal" form on earth, and I-c is possibly formed in the upper atmosphere.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @04:34AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @04:34AM (#163713)

        Crystalin form of water and carbon. That's no ice.

        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 29 2015, @11:54AM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 29 2015, @11:54AM (#163780)

          Crystalin form of water and carbon. That's no ice.

          Sure it is. A near perfect analogy is its just like adding phosphorous or boron to purified silicon to make P or N type silicon. Its still silicon but messing with the crystal lattice by adding stuff makes for really weird and economically useful changes in electrical characteristics. And wedging carbon into ice (or is it ice into carbon?) makes for really weird thermodynamic properties, much like high temp superconductors work.

          You do have a point in that by weight I donno if this exceeds some arbitrary level where you could call it something other than ice.

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Geezer on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:02AM

    by Geezer (511) on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:02AM (#163676)

    Ice 9 is here!

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:07AM (#163677)

    Soon we'll have Ice-Nine, and then it's all over.

    ps. Then I did some simple searching and found this article:
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_IX [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 29 2015, @01:18AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 29 2015, @01:18AM (#163686) Journal
      Sandwiching the Earth as a few atoms thick layer between two sheets of graphene could have other, more significant consequences. Just think of all that graphene in the environment. It's got to be a problem.
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Ken_g6 on Sunday March 29 2015, @03:35AM

      by Ken_g6 (3706) on Sunday March 29 2015, @03:35AM (#163705)

      But Vonnegut didn't use Roman numerals. Maybe the "9" in Ice-9 is short for 90°?

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by kaszz on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:24AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:24AM (#163692) Journal

    So this means graphene can be made and designed small enough to seriously control how atoms interact with each others. This should make it possible to create materials that are perhaps mind boggling. If the same trick can be accomplished at the subatomic scale, then one can perhaps really make atoms behave as desired within boundaries.

    This is way different from mixing chemicals and hoping for a reaction.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:42PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 29 2015, @12:42PM (#163791) Journal

      This should make it possible to create materials that are perhaps mind boggling

      Already done. See LSD.
      (grin)

      --
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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday March 29 2015, @04:39PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 29 2015, @04:39PM (#163851) Journal

      Doing this at the atomic scale is quite interesting. Doing this at the sub-atomic scale....what, exactly, do you mean? If you're talking about adjusting electron orbitals, that's how this is done. If you're talking about engineering the nucleus....well, there's a tremendous amount that we need to learn before that's even worth talking about, if it isn't just flat out impossible. (Unless you're talking about crude techniques like hitting a nucleus with just the right momentum encapsulated in a neutron and causing it to emit a beta particle and so move one higher in the periodic table.)

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      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday March 30 2015, @12:56AM

        by kaszz (4211) on Monday March 30 2015, @12:56AM (#164004) Journal

        By altering the particle zoo that makes up an atom one can perhaps accomplish properties that simple can't be found anywhere. Perhaps it can be done using interference or super cyclotrons.

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 30 2015, @06:37PM

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 30 2015, @06:37PM (#164415) Journal

          Anything that depends on high speed (super cyclotrons) is going to smash rocks into gravel. That's not going to help in building something unless you can collect it in one place and stabilize it until you're ready to use it. So if this is possible at all, we're a very long way from that capability. There might be some low energy process that would be feasible via, say, meson catalysis, but if so we don't know about it. Still, I'ld rate that a lot more likely. (OTOH, IANANP (I Am Not A Nuclear Physicist).

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          • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday March 30 2015, @10:12PM

            by kaszz (4211) on Monday March 30 2015, @10:12PM (#164527) Journal

            I suspect there's a lot of oh-shit-didn't-know-that to be found in the core of matter.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:28AM (#163695)

    of pencils in my warm can of beer to cool it off?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:41AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:41AM (#163699)

      It's room temperature ice, not cold ice

      naw who am I kidding, the answer is yes.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @05:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @05:48AM (#163719)

    The best use of graphene is it's apparent ability to separate H2O from salt and other molecules in suspension without having to use high pressure pumps to force water through dense filter mediums.
        http://scitechdaily.com/researchers-develop-graphene-membrane-water-filters/ [scitechdaily.com]