A Second Mention Of Graphene,

on the same day!

we all know that ice comes in cubes, but what I did not know until today was that only 17 different phases, or forms of ice have been observed on a molecular level, new research out of the U.K. suggests there might be an 18th form under very specific conditions, cubes or squares are the new shape of ice, it turns out that when you sandwich a droplet of water between two sheets of graphene at 10,000 times atmospheric pressure (one atmosphere is the pressure of the atmosphere at sea level), the atoms in the water molecules will straighten themselves out into a perfectly square grid, foregoing their favored snowflake shape for something that looks more like graph paper,

you can see the ice form in the video, usually when water freezes into ice, the atoms in water rearrange themselves into a hexagonal or tetrahedral lattice, which repeats over and over again, forming a natural crystal, but in high pressure situations, water apparently takes on different forms, "What's really odd about it is, it loses this tetrahedral structure," researcher Alan Soper told NPR, "That is the thing that's quite surprising, because I don't think it's been observed before." graphene, never heard of it until this morning, then I read about it twice!