https://phys.org/news/2025-12-ice-home-food-scientist-easy.html
When you splurge on a cocktail in a bar, the drink often comes with a slab of aesthetically pleasing, perfectly clear ice. The stuff looks much fancier than the slightly cloudy ice you get from your home freezer. How do they do this?
Clear ice is actually made from regular water—what's different is the freezing process.
With a little help from science, you can make clear ice at home, and it's not even that tricky. However, there are quite a few hacks on the internet that won't work. Let's dive into the physics and chemistry involved.
Homemade ice is often cloudy because it has a myriad of tiny bubbles and other impurities. In a typical ice cube tray, as freezing begins and ice starts to form inward from all directions, it traps whatever is floating in the water: mostly air bubbles, dissolved minerals and gases.
These get pushed toward the center of the ice as freezing progresses and end up caught in the middle of the cube with nowhere else to go.
That's why when making ice the usual way—just pouring water into a vessel and putting in the freezer—it will always end up looking somewhat cloudy. Light scatters as it hits the finished ice cube, colliding with the concentrated core of trapped gases and minerals. This creates the cloudy appearance.
As well as looking nice, clear ice is denser and melts slower because it doesn't have those bubbles and impurities. This also means that it dilutes drinks more slowly than regular, cloudy ice.
Because it doesn't have impurities, the clear ice should also be free from any inadvertent flavors that could contaminate your drink.
Additionally, because it's less likely to crumble, clear ice can be easily cut and formed into different shapes to further dress up your cocktail.
If you've tried looking up how to make clear ice before, you've likely seen several suggestions. These include using distilled, boiled or filtered water, and a process called directional freezing. Here's the science on what works and what doesn't.
You might think that to get clear ice, you simply need to start out with really clean water. However, a recent study found this isn't the case.
- Using boiling water: Starting out with boiling water does mean the water will have less dissolved gases in it, but boiling doesn't remove all impurities. It also doesn't control the freezing process, so the ice will still become cloudy.
- Using distilled water: While distilling water removes more impurities than boiling, distilled water still freezes from the outside in, concentrating any remaining impurities or air bubbles in the center, again resulting in cloudy ice.
- Using filtered or tap water: Filtering the water or using tap water also doesn't stop the impurities from concentrating during the conventional freezing process.
As it turns out, it's not the water quality that guarantees clear ice. It's all about how you freeze it. The main technique for successfully making clear ice is called "directional freezing."
Directional freezing is simply the process of forcing water to freeze in a single direction instead of from all sides at once, like it does in a regular ice cube tray.
This way, the impurities and air will be forced to the opposite side from where the freezing starts, leaving the ice clear except for a small cloudy section.
In practice, this means insulating the sides of the ice container so that the water freezes in one direction, typically from the top down. This is because heat transfer and phase transition from liquid to solid happens faster through the exposed top than the insulated sides.
The simplest way to have a go at directional freezing at home is to use an insulated container—you can use a really small cooler (that is, an "esky"), an insulated mug or even a commercially available insulated ice cube tray designed for making clear ice at home.
Fill the insulated container with water and place it in the freezer, then check on it periodically.
Once all the impurities and air bubbles are concentrated in a single cloudy area at the bottom, you can either pour away this water before it's fully frozen through, or let the block freeze solid and then cut off the cloudy portion with a large serrated knife, then cut the ice into cubes for your drinks.
If using a commercial clear ice tray, it will likely come with instructions on how to get rid of the cloudy portion so you can enjoy the sparkling clear ice.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(Score: 0, Troll) by namefags_are_jerks on Thursday January 08, @03:56AM (12 children)
Something that's been common knowledge for centuries somehow needs an article on a Science News websight.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday January 08, @08:00AM (1 child)
Which one in the queue of submissions is yours?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ls671 on Thursday January 08, @09:42AM
Quite frankly, I knew absolutely nothing on this topic and I found it very interesting after reading the whole summary. Most, importantly, I never realized or knew that "clear ice" was supposedly better and never noticed (or cared) about clear ice vs cloudy ice but I liked the technical and physicsl aspect of the whole thing.
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08, @08:14AM
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday January 08, @09:00AM (8 children)
Despite my previous comment, I will give you a more complete answer.
A decade ago it was relatively easy to find material suitable for publication. Today that is not the case. Much is hidden behind paywalls, VPNs, geolocation blocks, etc. Some news is released on other social media which we ourselves cannot see. The community here on SN wanted more stories to discuss but the task of finding the material was becoming increasingly difficult.
The community were also posting fewer submissions because more and more people were finding that they had to work harder for less money, and they simply did not have the time to seek out stories. We also noticed that many submissions were being made which did not fit exactly into our topics of interest but nevertheless were of some interest to at least a portion of our community. (For example, vehicles of all kinds and driving seem to be popular, so we are including a small number of them.) We made a conscious decision to ignore politics simply for politics sake - but if there was a link to one of our usual topics then those submissions could be considered, but released under the Politics nexus so that users could still filter them out by changing the settings on their own user page.
But what to do about the other submissions that didn't quite fit? The solution was that we introduced the 'Random' topic. It signifies that the discussions does not fit precisely into our usual stories but might still produce an interesting discussion. We broadened the editorial selection to make more submissions acceptable providing we can justify their inclusion. Nevertheless, just like every other story there will be some in our community who are not interested in them. Having a specific topic ("Random") made them easy to identify and, if the user wished, to filter out. We do not expect every story to appeal to every member, but we do not compel anyone to read them either.
This story is one such story. There is a weak science link. As an AC has already pointed out the story itself provides one. We are considering the "physics and chemistry" involved in the freezing process.
There are several options that we can consider:
I am sure that there will be many different viewpoints in our community. This would be an ideal time for those with strong views or alternative solutions to raise them in the journal regarding editorial matters which are currently being discussed [soylentnews.org].
Criticising things is very easy to do as things are rarely perfect. Finding alternative and acceptable solutions is much harder.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08, @09:43AM (3 children)
I also stopped submitting because my submitted stuff doesn't get approved. I can't be bothered to try to remember what I submitted, but they weren't offtopic stuff for SN.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Thursday January 08, @12:20PM (2 children)
We prioritise how we select stories a little bit. The first to be reviewed are those from named account holders. Next come from Upstart (the IRC submission bot) which somebody has at least made an effort to submit something. And finally we look at ACs and the other collection bots (Arthur etc). But they do all get looked at and all have a chance to be selected.
If you have been submitting stories simply as an AC then you are doing yourself a dis-service. You will not get any credit for your efforts, nor will they earn you a reputation as a good (and identifiable) submitter.
Without knowing the content of your submissions I can not offer any other advice on how to improve your chances of a submission making it to the front pages. You could, of course, always put them in your journal. We often recommend this when submissions are reaching the 'time-out' period, but if you are an AC we have no contact details so this wouldn't apply to you.
As I noted earlier, your comment would be better suited and would also be reviewed by the editorial team if you had included it in hubie's journal regarding the editorial process and proposed changes to it. It was posted in his journal so that ACs could make comments which would not be possible with a Meta.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09, @01:18PM (1 child)
I've made two submissions*. I think both as AC. One was accepted and on the front page a couple of hours later, the other wasn't because someone else did a better submission of the same story at almost the same time.
Anyone complaining they can't get stories accepted is probably lodging celebrity crap or political drivel.
*I'd like to make more, but I'm pretty busy and don't really come across stuff that I consider suitable for here very often. I come here to find the stuff usually. :)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday January 09, @02:47PM
You have hit the nail squarely on the head with this one comment. There has to be a connection to one of our topics for a story to be selected.
As an experiment, I have today posted a submission in the journal of "Arthur T Knackerbracket". It has no such connection but I would rather see it discussed in a journal than introduced into another discussion elsewhere where it would be off-topic. Let's see if, and how, it is accepted. This is NOT an invitation to submit more political rubbish but the discussion is an important one for all Americans.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 3, Informative) by ls671 on Thursday January 08, @09:46AM
Get over it! As I posted above, I enjoyed the article and I found it refreshing.
Thanks for your services! :)
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Thursday January 08, @10:35AM (1 child)
Perfectly clear ice:
I have seen this in high-end restaurants , and in huge blocks at a fish market. I figured there was some trick to it, as I have seen and handled ice all my life, but my ice was rarely so clear. I had just passed it off as air the city deliberately injects into the water mains to keep everyone's water hammer suppressors working. It's obvious when I draw a fresh glass of water from the tap and it's all cloudy. Same with the fish tank. Yet wait an hour and the water in the glass or fish tank is quite clear. So, I figured air entrapment was it and let it go. Maybe I had to let the water sit an hour or so without the usual 80psi or so line pressure for the air to come out. Never bothered to test that hypothesis. I knew the cloudy water was just air, and why it was there, and left it at that.
But you ran it up the pole. My hypothesis was missing. Ok, then, what is it? It got me curious too. Ok...it's kinda like refining silicon ingots by zone refining at the edge of a phase change. Never thought about it that way, but I do now.
These little forays into oddities I was completely ignorant of is one of the reasons I frequent this site, albeit the main reason I frequent this site is to read comments from what I believe is probably the last finely curated collection of English-speaking people of a scientific mindset on this planet. I know of several of these gems of intelligence amongst the flotsam of the internet, each finely tuned to a very narrow type of people, of which I consider the kind of people I like to associate with.
This site is high quality, not high quantity. This place reminds me of the quality of people I used to work with before the world as I knew it ( an aerospace company in Southern California , USA ) went all crazy with notions not backed by physics or common sense - things like look-before-you-leap kind of thing. Don't commit before you know it will work - things planned in ignorance ( especially mine! ) are extremely apt to fail. And they did. We all paid a high price for that: The destruction of our company. Yes, I am experiencing the same problems a lot of old people face. They've been there, done that, and for many things, don't wanna do *that* again. The first time was painful enough. We come over here and talk about it. It's higher quality practical advice than most people pay for. I feel it's better, as the advice shared here is with a intent to help someone, whereas paid advice is usually someone attempting to insert their hand into a cash flow.
I post this to document my experience to other engineers facing the same problem trying to communicate with those obsessed with schedule. Haste makes Waste. This has to be continuously retaught at the cost of perfectly good ( but not perfectly experienced ) engineers.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday January 08, @11:31AM
"Ok...it's kinda like refining silicon ingots by zone refining at the edge of a phase change. Never thought about it that way, but I do now"
Got that from pTamok. ( A couple of posts down ).
Thanks!
See what I mean by a finely curated group?
This is what happens here.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday January 08, @12:18PM
I find the site still very interesting and worthwhile despite the challenges. Congratulations to submitters and editors!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08, @06:09AM
I didn't know either. I asked GPT.
( Posted anon - too embarrassed to admit ignorance )
-----_--------------------
How to make perfectly clear ice (directional-freezing method)
What you need
Small insulated cooler or dedicated clear-ice mold
Filtered or distilled water (optional: boiled then cooled)
Freezer with a flat shelf
Sharp knife or ice pick (for trimming)
Airtight container or freezer bag for storage
Step-by-step
Use cold, filtered or distilled water. Boiling then cooling helps but isn’t required.
Fill the cooler or mold with water to desired depth (3–6 in / 7–15 cm for large blocks).
Place the open cooler/mold in the freezer with the lid off so the top is exposed. Insulation around sides forces freezing from the top down (directional freezing), pushing air and impurities downward.
Freeze for 24–48 hours depending on size. Stop when the top portion is fully solid but a slushy/clear line remains near the bottom (this is where trapped air/impurities collect).
Remove from freezer and let sit at room temperature for 10–30 minutes so the block loosens from the container.
Turn out the block, chip or saw away the cloudy bottom section, and trim edges for a clear cube or sphere. Use a serrated knife or hot-water-dip technique for cleaner cuts.
Store clear pieces in an airtight container in the freezer to prevent frost.
Tips for best results
Directional freezing (insulated sides, open top) is the key—air and dissolved gases are driven away from the freezing front.
Larger blocks give larger perfectly clear centers; small trays rarely become fully clear.
Avoid tap water with lots of dissolved minerals; distilled gives the clearest result.
Rapid temperature changes cause cracking—let the block temper briefly before cutting.
Quick alternative: buy silicone sphere or cube clear-ice molds designed for directional freezing or purchase pre-made clear ice.
(Score: 4, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday January 08, @08:36AM (3 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_melting [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday January 09, @03:37PM (2 children)
For a more "fun" reference look into how Apple Jack is made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applejack_(drink) [wikipedia.org]
Now an interesting side effect of Apple Jack production is the contaminants that give you a pounding hangover are ALSO concentrated by removing chemically pure ice.
Applejack suffers badly from the mead effect or the absinthe effect where people have a positive connotation to the name so lets put grain alcohol and artificial flavors in a bottle and sell it under that name. But "old school" real applejack will be made "up north" anywhere there's apples and its cold enough.
Wait, did I say chemically pure ice, or ... pure-er ice? I have not found a good reference on drinking water purification by zone refining. I'm sure it won't remove 100% of the bad stuff but whatever it removes as a pre-filter can't concentrate later on or clog filters later on. Using zone refining to pre-filter drinking water is interesting to think about.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday January 10, @02:17PM (1 child)
In certain jurisdictions, freeze-distillation is just as illegal as normal distillation.
As you point out, concentrating the congeners is not ideal.
You can also freeze-distill beer:
https://beerbaconliberty.com/en/2025/08/18/freeze-distilled-beers-history-pioneers-the-strongest-beer-in-poland/ [beerbaconliberty.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bock#Eisbock [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday January 10, @04:39PM
Ah yes the ATF ruling 94-3 its not distilling if you remove less than half a percent via incidental whatever while home brewing.
I was kind of into brewing like a quarter century ago. If you brew HUGE amounts of beer, like a bit beyond normal home brewer limits, like swimming pools of the stuff, apparently yeast is exothermic and will heat the water a bit requiring cooling, a surface area to volume thing that is not an issue for my 5 gallon glass carboys LOL. So just like totally novice weightlifters pretend they need workout plans like olympic pros, small timer small scale legal home brewers used to have a thing about using cooler ice packs to keep their beer cold.
Also if you want to lager and its just plain old too hot you might need cooling. People who REALLY get into lagers will modify a big dorm fridge like my coworker did. Like 50F. Even my basement in the winter doesn't get that cold. Probably too many servers LOL. I guess its kind of a flex to spend enough money to ferment lagers at home in the middle of summer, it costs some money thats for sure but its affordable. Its a cheaper hobby than golf.
Anyway the ATF doesn't care if you remove a few ice crystals in the process of ice fermenting as long as its less than 0.5%. If you have a chiller dipped in the wort and there's a little ice build up on it the ATF is like "whatever".
My personal opinion of chillers is the more stuff you have messing around with the wort the more chance for contamination, so just brew your lagers in the shed during spring/fall and brew other things in the summer.
The irony of home brewing is its a very technical fun hobby and you can descend into the biochemical depths for interesting results but fun as it is, I don't really drink much beer LOL. Its a cool hobby of infinite depth if you want to spend a lifetime learning. Like ham radio or fine woodworking or "computer stuff"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Thursday January 08, @03:59PM (8 children)
Minor nitpick with some claims made in the summary:
OK, let's look at the claims:
The only way that I can see the impure ice melting faster is if the chemical impurities (i.e. dissolved minerals) are dense enough to change the melting rate, and if only the cloudy ice is made with extremely hard water (i.e. the clear ice is made of purified water and the cloudy is made of hard water). Impure water freezes at a lower temperature, to the tune of ~1.9oC per mol of impurities in a kilogram of water. Lower temperature means a higher difference in temperature from the environment, so faster heat transfer. How much?
Hard water with 180ish mg/L of CaCO3 has a molality of ~0.002mol/Kg, which would lower the hard-water ice's melting temperature ~by 0.004oC. Assuming a 20oC room, that increases the heat transfer [1] by 0.02%... I doubt you would notice that difference in melting rate, but you will certainly taste the difference at that concentration of dissolved Calcium.
Am I missing something? I'd love some peer review on this, feel free to check my math and bring up any points I may have missed about how this works.
OK, rant over :)
[1] Both Newton's Law of Convection and Fourier's law of Conduction have a linear relationship between heat transfer and temperature difference, so the ratio of heat transfer rate between pure ice and hard water ice is dependent only on the difference in dT between the cases. I calculated this as (freezing point depression amount)/(room temperature), since the rest of the variables should stay the same and freezing point of pure water is oC.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anotherblackhat on Thursday January 08, @04:24PM (2 children)
Melting speed is affected by surface area, and those bubbles of air are going to increase the surface area, but I doubt that will have much effect overall.
I think the melt speed idea is a confusion of the shape of the ice.
Those fancy clear ice balls melt slower than ice cubes. (Crushed ice melts even faster.)
If anyone wants to make clear ice at home, I recommend searching Amazon for "clear ice mold" -- they're relatively cheap, and come in a variety of styles.
If you want slow melting then pick spherical (a.k.a. ball), but if you're going for the coolness factor, then a skull or diamond shaped mold is probably a better choice.
(Score: 3, Funny) by OrugTor on Thursday January 08, @04:56PM
I once had an ice tray with the molds in the shape of a female human form. I got it in a garage sale. I was the refreshments person at a square dance club so I put some ice women into the non-alcoholic punch. Some people got upset because the ice women appeared to be naked. No-one got upset because the ice was cloudy.
True story.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Thursday January 08, @07:34PM
You may be onto something. Heat conduction is a function of surface area, and surface roughness/shape can potentially result in infinite surface area even for finite volumes (see famous Torricelli's Trumpet paradox, also shoreline length estimates). That will affect the rate at which heat travels from the drink to the ice in order to cause melting.
Imma stick with my guns tho, and here's why:
My original model for this assumed infinite rate of heat conduction through the drink and into the ice. The ice/drink system is in equilibrium; in a perfectly insulated cup the ice would not melt, and the entire system would be at 0oC until all of the ice melts. Ice with a higher surface area to volume ratio would reach equilibrium faster, but the same mass of water would melt between the initial conditions and steady state. Once equilibrium is reached the melt rate is determined by heat entering the system from the environment.
You got me thinking about the trapped air bubbles and how else they might affect the ice; it's reasonable to ask if they might make the ice somewhat insulative. I think this doesn't matter, other than slowing down the time to reach initial equilibrium. The ice may (should) come from the freezer cooler than the melting point, and will take some time to warm up to the same temperature as the drink; this is the time that air bubbles matter for internal conduction. After that the entire cube is at the same temperature throughout, and instead of changing temperature adds or sheds mass as energy is removed or added. This being the case only surface area matters as a limit of rate of melting, not heat conduction rate through the cube itself.
The real question is whether the ice-drink interface creates any bottlenecks for heat flow relative to the drink-glass interface. I can imagine this being an issue for those giant spheres they use one of in whiskey, and less of an issue for multiple cubes in a different drink; i.e. the more surface area the clear ice has, the less important surface roughness becomes for the bubbly ice. I'm inclined to think that the biggest mechanism for getting heat into the system is condensation on the outside of the glass. Air convection in general is a pretty poor way to transfer heat (relative to conduction through glass and convection in fluids). A quick check of my engineering tables shows that for a 1 oC temperature difference air transfers 10-100 Watts per square meter, and freely convecting water transfers 100-1200 Watts. Surface area between the drink and glass shouldn't change during the melting process (unless you drink some of the liquid) because the ice displaces its own weight in water, so as it melts the water level doesn't change at all. Surface area of ice does decrease as the ice melts, so that could become a limiting factor near the end of the melting process. In that case the rough surface texture would keep heat transfer rates higher, so I could be convinced that the bubbly ice might melt faster, maybe, if the heat transfer rate were high enough for the drink to warm up faster than the clear ice can cool it via melting (hot, humid summer barbecue, perhaps?). This would result in the drink being warmer than the ice, which would start giving the clear ice an advantage since it would have a larger temperature difference. I'd want to run tests.
...Apologies for the wall of text, I think I've been nerd sniped...
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08, @04:41PM (1 child)
It's probably literally true that "bubbly ice" melts faster but I have a hard time imagining the effect is very noticeable. But it is at certainly a testable hypothesis. The rate of energy transfer from thermal conduction is proportional to surface area. The total energy required to melt the ice is proportional to mass.
Since it is less dense, "bubbly ice" will have a larger surface area for a given mass, but then as the embedded bubbles are liberated this will probably contribute to a generally rougher surface (thus increased surface area) and therefore more thermal conduction and faster melting.
I imagine the exact size and shape of the ice cubes probably has a much bigger effect on how long they last in a drink.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday January 08, @09:39PM
Hmm - the bubbles will have a non-zero volume, so for a lump of ice of the same outer dimensions, there will be less frozen water in cloudy ice than clear ice. Air has a much lower heat capacity than water, and could well escape when still below the temperature of the bulk liquid in the drink.
As there is less ice to melt, then even if we ignore surface area considerations, it will melt in a shorter time than ice without air bubbles, so the cooling effect will be of shorter duration.
Whether this is enough to be noticeable is another matter. I have no idea what volume of entrained air is typically captured in the ice.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday January 09, @04:01PM (1 child)
1) This seems like something the Mythbusters or Good Eats or maybe even Modernist Cuisine would have taken on and tested decades ago. But I find no evidence (not proving none exists, but I sure didn't find any) How could no one have ever tried this? I didn't find anything by the usual suspects but I'm sure there's a youtube short out there somewhere...
2) One ice maker company makes the interesting claim that its not a bulk effect of the whole cube its surface area to volume of CRYSTALS as they microscopically melt and break off at a very small scale. The guy has a point. Melting is a molecular thing not a bulk process and I could see if there is any chunkiness at all to melting, the clear ice will surely have larger crystals. No one seems to be proposing using snow-cone-d spectrographically pure distilled water in compressed bricks. The size of the individual crystal is probably important.
3) I can't get any straight answer on the relative absorption of crystal clear ice vs the crud in cloudy ice. Higher? Lower? Most people expect visually non-transparent to absorb more IR also, but its not necessarily true you can make good, even great, IR lenses out of germanium metal. "probably" I'd give it 80% odds that the crud in cloudy ice will absorb more IR than clear ice will. Enough to warm it from the inside? Maybe? A funny experiment would be to blast the hell out of clear and cloudy ice cubes with a really big IR laser and see which explode most impressively given enough power. Somehow I doubt a few square inches of my 98.6F hand emit enough watts of IR compared to conduction and convection in the typical bar area. Hypothetically you could make bricks of cloudy and clear ice and stack them in front of a raging fireplace and see which melt faster from IR.
4) Personal experience: I assure you the tongue feel of mostly melted cloudy home ice is pretty rough compared to smooth clear partially melted restaurant ice. So there really is a "tongue observable" difference in surface roughness thus SA to V ratio of those ices. The delta in melt time is probably very low but there has to be one. Also regardless of melting rate people like getting all weird about texture of food so whichever is more expensive or impressive or easier to complain or easier to brag about about will be declared "better" and as a fashion fad it'll probably flip flop in the usual fashion fad process. So after the flip flop, restaurants will be spending big money to make cloudy rough ice to really grip on to the flavor profile of your whiskey, etc.
5) The SA to V ratio might not work as simple as you'd think when you factor in drink convection currents and fluid dynamics. Not impossible that rough cloudy ice could ruin convection currents in the drink enough to end up melting slower (as long as its not continuously mechanically stirred etc)
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday January 13, @01:40PM
So, you're saying we need to get StyroPyro in on this? You have my full support :)
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by owl on Friday January 09, @11:18PM
If we consider that the article author is likely not a scientist nor has much science background, then the article author's likely meaning of "melts slower" is "change in size of cube over time" -- which would directly be your change in volume per change in time.
As well, if we consider that the majority of the ice melt that is easily perceivable on a human scale occurs when cold ice is introduced into a warm drink, then the author's likely meaning begins to make some sense. To cool X volume of drink from starting temperature Y to 0C will require the phase change of Z amount of water. The Z amount is fixed whether the ice is bubbly or clear, the same amount of water must phase change to absorb the latent heat of the drink. But, a bubbly cube, being less dense, will visibly shrink a greater amount in order to phase change Z quantity of water. To a non-scientist, I could see someone labeling this "faster melting". They drop in a 2 cm^3 block of bubbly ice in a drink, and after the fast melt period slows the cube appears 1 cm^3 in size. They drop a 2 cm^3 block of clear in the same size/temperature drink, and after the fast melt period slows the cube appears to be 1.25 cm^3 (made up amount). The clear ice cube appears larger, so they describe it as "the bubbly cube" melted faster. Even though, in reality, the exact same amount of water changed phase to absorb the latent heat.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lonehighway on Thursday January 08, @08:48PM
Or you could just buy a counter top clear ice maker. They are inexpensive and easy to find. Clear ice, or as I call it restaurant ice, tastes so much better it’s hard to go back to cloudy ice. I think I paid $179 for mine several years ago on Amazon.