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  • 6 days ago
Ice cubes are our most common way of shaping ice to cool our drinks, but in nature water forming into cubic ice is rare and possibly doesn’t even happen at all.

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00:00ice cubes are a most common way of shaping ice to cool our drinks but in nature water forming into
00:09cubic ice is rare and thought to possibly not even happen at all science alert reports that
00:13while ice can freeze in a number of ways any discoveries of cubic ice in nature could actually
00:18be the freezing of other structural shapes that only end up looking cubic in the end but now
00:22researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they have created cubic ice in a lab and
00:27despite sounding kind of silly it actually has wide reaching implications this is how
00:31ice generally forms in a multitude of outstretching hexagonal crystals but when the researchers
00:36froze water on 2d sheets of graphene the majority of the ice crystals froze in tiny cubic shapes
00:41what's more the cubic ice remained cubic throughout the experiment and didn't change phases during the
00:46consistent minus two hundred and seventy six degree fahrenheit conditions the researchers say this
00:51tells us what conditions the cubic ice is more likely to occur at specifically extremely cold
00:56ones but those are the same conditions that are present in our upper atmosphere which the
01:00researchers say is also important for understanding how things freeze at extremely dramatic temperatures
01:05something they say could be crucial in better understanding the process of cryopreservation
01:10and ice at a molecular level

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