In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, a central plot element is called ice-nine. The substance, created in a lab, was made up of familiar H 2 O molecules, but they were locked in a novel ...

Last year, writer Joseph Stromberg discovered his great-uncle Robert R. Stromberg was involved in a then-famous, now-forgotten scientific incident surrounding polywater. ByTim De Chant Friday, ...

Polywater evaporated when scientists confirmed that impurities in ordinary water were responsible for the strange properties (SN: 9/1/73, p. 133). In the decades since that debunking, physicists have ...

In the 1960s, scientists in the US and Russia independently discovered a new form of water that was 40 percent denser, didn’t solidify until 40 degrees below Celsius, and didn’t seem to boil no matter ...

The editorial regarding “The Chemistry Book” by Derek Lowe (C&EN, March 7, page 3) mentioned only indirectly one of the most remarkable properties claimed for polywater: It supposedly solidified at ...

Western scientists were frankly skeptical. Russian Chemists N. Fedyakin and Boris Deryagin claimed to have produced a mysterious new substance, a form of water that was so stable it boiled only at ...