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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