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An international team of researchers from University College Dublin (UCD) and University of Saskatchewan, Canada, have observed 'proton-hopping' movement in a high-pressure form of ice (Ice VII lattices). Ordinary water ice is known as Ice I, while Ice VII is a cubic crystalline form of ice which can be formed from liquid water above 3 GPa (30,000 atmospheres) by lowering its temperature to room temperature, or by decompressing heavy water (D2O) Ice VI below 95 K. Ice VII has a simple structure of two inter-penetrating, and effectively independent, cubic-ice sub-lattices, and is stable across a wide-ranging region above 2 GPa....

Trapped in the rigid structure of diamonds formed deep in the Earth’s crust, scientists have discovered a form of water ice that was not previously known to occur naturally on our planet. The finding, published Thursday in Science, represents the first detection of naturally occurring ice-VII ever found on Earth. And as sometimes happens in the scientific process, it was discovered entirely by accident. Ice-VII is about one and a half times as dense as the regular ice we put in our drinks and skate on in winter, and the crystalline structure of its atoms is different as well. In...

The surprising discovery of "square ice" which forms at room temperature was made by an international team of researchers last week. The study was published in Nature by a team of scientists from UK and Germany led by Andre Geim of University of Manchester and G. Algara-Siller of University of Ulm. The accompanying review article was done by Alan Soper of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK. "We didn't expect to find square ice ... We found there is something strange in terms of water going through [nanochannels]. It's going too fast. And you can't explain that by just imagining a...

College Park, MD (July 27, 2010) -- Earth's climate is strongly influenced by the presence of particles of different shapes and origins -- in the form of dust, ice and pollutants -- that find their way into the lowest portion of the atmosphere, the troposphere. There, water adsorbed on the surface of these particles can freeze at higher temperatures than pure water droplets, triggering rain and snow. Researchers at Spain's Centre d'Investigació en Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (CIN2) have studied the underlying mechanisms of water condensation in the troposphere and found a way to make artificial materials to control water condensation...

Elastic Water could eventually replace plastic, or be used in an environmentally-safe plastic. Bernama, a part of the Malaysian National News Agency, reports that Japanese scientists have created “elastic water." Developed at the Tokyo University, the new material consists mostly of water--95-percent--with an added two grams of clay and organic material. The resulting substance resembles jelly, but is extremely elastic and transparent. The invention was originally revealed last week in the latest issue of the Nature scientific magazine. According to the article, the new material is quite safe for the environment and humans, and may be a “long-term” tool in...

Scientists are reporting that, for the first time, they have made an artificial prion, or misfolded protein, that can, by itself, produce a deadly infectious disease in mice and may help explain the roots of mad cow disease. The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are strong evidence for the "protein-only hypothesis," the controversial idea that a protein, acting alone without the help of DNA or RNA, a cousin of DNA, can cause certain kinds of infectious diseases. The concept was introduced in 1982 by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco,...