I don’t know, this sounds an awful lot like Polywater. I hope they cleaned their damn test tubes this time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater
Did you ever try to clean the inside of a nanotube?
Very interesting. I was a ‘fresh out of college’ engineer in the ‘70s, and don’t recall hearing about poly water. The story reminds me a lot of the ‘global warming’ hype. Maybe that, too, will be a Wikipedia footnote in another half century.