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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @07:24PM
Fuck the World! Freeze it Solid! Kill every Thing!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @07:41PM
I hope they didn't just invent ice-nine. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @08:08PM
I hope MIT invented ice-nine and I hope Trump uses it.
(Score: 2, Funny) by takyon on Thursday December 01 2016, @08:54PM
Could parent comment secretly be on-topic??? [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @09:07PM
Scientists who value social justice more than the pursuit of knowledge are not scientists. They are frauds.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Zz9zZ on Thursday December 01 2016, @10:06PM
We're already offtopic, and I down modded Takyon to try and discourage the political zingers in our discussions.
But, now that we're here, what makes you say that the scientists value social justice more than science itself? It seems to me that they're worried about the future of scientific advancement, and while words supposedly mean nothing anymore I can't blame the scientists for being alarmed by creationists and climate change deniers.
Also, such values as:
We unconditionally reject every form of bigotry, discrimination, hateful rhetoric, and hateful action, whether directed towards one’s race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, disability, citizenship, political views, socioeconomic status, veteran status, or immigration status.
We endorse MIT’s values of open, respectful discourse and exchange of ideas from the widest variety of intellectual, religious, class, cultural, and political perspectives.
We uphold the principles of the scientific method, of fact- and reason-based objective inquiry. Science is not a special interest; it is not optional. Science is a foundational ingredient in how we as a society analyze, understand, and solve the most difficult challenges that we face.
have always been pretty solidly upheld by academia. Analysis of human society is also a scientific endeavor, and scientists are people too.
Perhaps you've just got an axe to grind? Anti-intellectual, down with the ivory tower elites, etc.?
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @11:16PM
I always wondered why anybody would possibly want to burn the Library at Alexandria and murder its head librarian.
In this brave new era of duckspeak and bellyfeel, I think I'm beginning to see what might have happened.
Protip: if you're a scientist without CCW, you might get Trumped. CCW is the only way to Trump a Trumpeter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @03:41AM
Haha I wouldn't worry about getting shot by a trump supporter, but I would worry about having our freedoms stripped even further away along with a drastic increase in prison populations.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday December 01 2016, @09:58PM
Nah, unless the carbon nanotubes are somehow self replicating with dissolved CO2 or something...
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @08:49PM
Maybe they can enlighten us by adding their findings to the Water Phase Diagram... [xkcd.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @09:02PM
Name dropping in an xkcd. The names dropped are Vanilla Ice, David Bowie, and Queen. Randall Monroe is a privileged white racist asshole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @02:10AM
The only asshole is the one that ruined the joke. For an XKCD comic, I thought it was one of the funnier ones and certainly on topic.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @09:15PM
So is the nanorod dehumidifier a useful technology that will be available for peaceful applications, or will the American Empire of Terror only use it to murder brown people?
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Thursday December 01 2016, @09:23PM
This reminds me of polywater (which turned out not to be real).
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/ATG/polywater.html [cmu.edu]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater [wikipedia.org]
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/11/polywater_history_and_science_mistakes_the_u_s_and_ussr_raced_to_create.html [slate.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 01 2016, @11:47PM
Just shoot somebody with a tranq-dart filled with this stuff and freeze their bloodstream solid...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @05:23AM
OK so you got the nanotubes inside the blood, now how do you get the blood inside the tiny cavities of carbon nanotubes
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @02:22PM
Tiny vacuums?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @03:07PM
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...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @12:11PM
Ice-Nine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine [wikipedia.org]