Whatever happened to the cold drinks?

New York Times ^ | February 21, 2006 | KENNETH CHANG

[raygun]

Here is one question that probably won't cross the minds of Sasha Cohen, Irina Slutskaya and the other Olympic women figure skaters today, even if they fall: Why is ice slippery?

The explanation once commonly dispensed in textbooks turns out to be wrong. And slipperiness is just one of the unanswered puzzles about ice. Besides the everyday ice that you slip on, there are about a dozen other forms, some of which experts suspect exist in the hot interior of Earth or on the surface of Pluto.

[snip]

Ice, said Robert M. Rosenberg, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, "is a very mysterious solid."

[the above snipped out of a two page article]

[raygun]

From your statement, I could infer that, theoretcialy at least, on any arbitrary planet that has bodies of liquid antimoney, bismuth & lead, people could ice-fish for watever critters would live in such a concoction? Hypothetically speaking that is...

[Richard Kimball]

Did you ever think how fortunate we are that water's not flammable?

"Put that cigarette out! Don't you know you're on the beach?"