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Scientists have created a new type of ice that matches the density and structure of water, perhaps opening a door to studying water’s mysterious properties.

“It might be liquid water frozen in time,” says Martin Chaplin, a specialist in water structure at London South Bank University, who was not involved in the work. “It could be very important.”

The ice is called medium-density amorphous ice. The team that created it, led by Alexander Rosu-Finsen at University College London (UCL), shook regular ice in a small container with centimetre-wide stainless-steel balls at temperatures of –200 ˚C to produce the variant, which has never been seen before. The ice appeared as a white granular powder that stuck to the metal balls. The findings were published today in Science¹.

Haphazard molecules

Normally, when water freezes, it crystallizes and its molecules are arranged into the familiar hexagonal, solid structure that we call ice. Ice is less dense than its liquid form — an unusual property for a crystal. Depending on conditions such as pressure and the speed of freezing, water can also solidify in any of two dozen other regular arrangements. Amorphous ice is different: it has no such order. “You have lots of molecules joining on haphazardly,” says Chaplin.

Two types of amorphous ice have been previously discovered, both in the twentieth century. ‘Low-density’ amorphous ice is the result of water vapour freezing onto a very cold surface, at a temperature lower than –150 ˚C; ‘high-density’ amorphous ice forms by compressing ordinary ice at similar temperatures under high pressure. Although neither type is common on Earth, both are plentiful in space. “Comets are big chunks of low-density amorphous ice,” says Christoph Salzmann, a chemist at UCL and a co-author of the latest work.

The team used a ball mill, a tool normally used to grind or blend materials in mineral processing, to grind down crystallized ice. Using a container with metal balls inside, they shook a small amount of ice about 20 times per second. The metal balls produced a ‘shear force’ on the ice, says Salzmann, breaking it down into a white powder.

Firing X-rays at the powder and measuring them as they bounced off — a process known as X-ray diffraction — allowed the team to work out its structure. The ice had a molecular density similar to that of liquid water, with no apparent ordered structure to the molecules — meaning that crystallinity was “destroyed”, says Salzmann. “You’re looking at a very disordered material.”

The results are “pretty convincing”, says Marius Millot, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. “This is a great example of how we still have things to understand with water.”

The results matched models produced by scientists on the team at the University of Cambridge, UK, predicting what would happen if regular ice was broken down in this manner. It’s unclear, however, whether the resultant powder truly matches the properties of liquid water, given that it was previously frozen as crystallized ice. Investigating that will require further work.

Big implications

If confirmed, the new form of ice could enable studies of water in a manner that was not possible before. “Liquid water is a strange material,” says Chaplin. “We still don’t know as much about it as we’d like.” For example, it is commonly thought that water is composed of two forms, low-density and high-density water, matching the previously known variants of amorphous ice. The discovery of a medium-density amorphous ice could challenge that idea.

“If medium-density amorphous ice is really connected to liquid water, it would imply that this model is incorrect,” says Salzmann. “It could open up a new chapter in ice research.”

There are implications, too, for understanding other worlds. Some moons in our Solar System, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, have icy surfaces. If two icy areas on such a moon were to rub together because of tidal forces, they could produce medium-density amorphous ice between them through the same shearing process that the researchers used.

The increase in density could create gaps in the surface, producing disruptions on the moons as the ice cracks together. “There would be a massive collapse of the ice,” says Salzmann. “It could have severe implications for the geophysics of the icy moons.”

That could, in turn, have implications for the potential habitability of liquid-water oceans that lie under the ice surfaces on these moons. “One of the key things about those moons is whether you can have an interface between liquid water and the rocks — this is where life could emerge,” says Millot. “Amorphous ice could have a role that we need to understand.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on February 2 2023.

New research suggests that users of top-of-the-line Android devices sold in China are getting their personal data pilfered left, right and center, according to new research. The collection, which is happening without notification or consent, could easily lead to the persistent tracking of users and the easy unmasking of their identities.

A study published by computer scientists at several different universities reveals that phone makers like Xiamoi, OnePlus, and Oppo Realme, some of the most popular in China, are all collecting massive amounts of sensitive user data via their respective operating systems, as are a variety of apps that come pre-installed on the phones. The data is also getting hoovered up by an assortment of other private actors, and researchers worry that the devices in question “send a worrying amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) not only to the device vendor but also to service providers like Baidu and to Chinese mobile network operators.” Given private industry’s close relationship with the Chinese government, it’s more than enough to raise the specter of broader surveillance concerns for mobile users in China.

What’s the big takeaway? For researchers, there’s clearly some work to be done when it comes to respecting Chinese users privacy. “Overall, our findings paint a troubling picture of the state of user data privacy in the world’s largest Android market, and highlight the urgent need for tighter privacy controls to increase the ordinary people’s trust in technology companies, many of which are partially state-owned,” they write.

Researchers experimented with a number of devices purchased from manufacturers in China and conducted network analysis on them to understand relevant data leakage. In general, researchers assumed that the operator of the device would be a “privacy-aware consumer,” who has opted out of sending analytics and personalization data to providers and doesn’t use cloud storage or “any other optional third-party services.”

The PII being collected includes pretty sensitive stuff, including basic user information like phone numbers and persistent device identifiers (IMEI and MAC addresses, advertising IDs, and more), geolocation data (which, obviously, would allow an observer to unmask your physical location), and data related to “social connections”—such as contacts, their phone numbers, and phone and text metadata, the study found. In other words, the recipients of this data would have a pretty clear picture of who is using a particular device, where they are doing it, and who they’re talking to. Phone numbers in China are also tied to an individual “citizen ID,” meaning that it’s inextricably tied to the user’s real, legal identity.

All of that data is getting vacuumed up without any user notification or consent, and there’s no way to opt out of this data collection, according to researchers. The collection also doesn’t stop when the device and the user exit China, despite the fact that different countries have different privacy laws that should impact the way information is collected, the study said. Researchers found that data was sent to Chinese mobile operators even when they weren’t providing service (for example, when no SIM card had been inserted into the device).

If you’re even halfway familiar with China’s overall posture towards data privacy, you might find yourself thinking, “Yes, other bombshell revelations include water: wet.” But the researchers’ findings provide specific details about how, exactly, Chinese phone manufacturers and third party sites are actively collecting user data. The study’s findings also seems to fly in the face of China’s recent passage of a GDPR-style privacy law, which is supposed to protect Chinese consumers from data collection without consent.

Gizmodo reached out to the phone manufacturers in question to ask for comment. We will update this story if they respond.

Rolls-Royce Holdings is getting into the nuclear reactor business. The British aerospace engineering company says it’s developing a micro-nuclear reactor that the company hopes could be a source of fuel for long trips to the Moon and Mars.

As humanity begins to venture back into space, with crewed missions scheduled to visit the Moon and Mars within the next two decades, the technology that moves us throughout the solar system will be a pivotal part of that journey. Last week, Rolls-Royce teased the design of its Rolls-Royce micro-reactor for spaceflight with a digital mockup posted to Twitter last week:

As the company explained in a tweet, the reactor will rely on uranium, a common fuel used in nuclear fission. Nuclear fission involves bombarding an atom with a neutron. That atom then splits, releasing energy, and that energy could be used to propel a rocket. Nuclear reactors have been used to power things like submarines, but its use in spaceflight has often been overlooked in favor of chemical-based propulsion.

As to whether the final product will appear just like the mockup shown in the tweet, well, that remains to be seen. In a promo video on the company’s website, Head of Innovation Products and Services Jake Thompson says that the company is in the “concept, design, development, and testing phase” of the reactor, meaning a full-fledged announcement of the final product is still a ways off. That said, Thompson did say that the company is working on a basic prototype.

Rolls-Royce Holdings announced in 2021 its intent to develop nuclear reactor technology, having obtained $600 million in public and private funding to develop its business. Since the nuclear reactor won’t have to carry as much fuel as a chemical propulsion rocket, the entire system will be lighter allowing for faster travel or increased payloads. The company says that the reactor could serve as both a new form of propulsion and a power source for bases on the Moon or Mars, and Rolls-Royce claims that they will have a nuclear reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029.

Rolls-Royce is not the only party working on rocket propulsion outside of traditional chemical fuel. NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a collaboration to develop a thermal rocket engine that could improve the time it takes to get to deep space. Likewise, NASA had a successful test of a rotating detonation rocket engine, which uses less fuel and provides more thrust than current propulsion systems.

More: Space Sail Experiment Showcases Promising Technique for Quickly Disposing Space Junk

With summers now warmer than ever, enjoying the great outdoors inside a stiflingly hot tent is becoming less appealing than a vacation spent relaxing in an air-conditioned hotel room. That could soon change, however, as a University of Connecticut researcher has created a new fabric that could potentially cool the inside of a tent by up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

The fabrics currently used to make tents are engineered to block out winds and water to help keep their inhabitants dry and comfortable, but they tend to work both ways, preventing hot air inside the tent from escaping. That’s great when temperatures dip in the evening, but even with plenty of ventilation, on a hot Summer’s day, the inside of a tent can feel sweltering.

You can always pack a portable air conditioner to drop the temperature inside your tent, but those require one ingredient that’s often in short supply at rural campsites: electricity. A solar panel simply isn’t going to generate enough power to keep a portable AC unit, or even a simple fan, running indefinitely, and you don’t want to have to carry a backpack full of batteries.

Inspired by how, “plants wick water from the ground and then sweat to cool themselves,” Al Kasani, a researcher at the University of Connecticut’s Center For Clean Energy Engineering, created a self-cooling tent fabric. It remains thin and light so a tent can still be easily packed down, but the fabric has been enhanced with titanium nanoparticles that pull water from reservoirs located at the base of a tent and spread it across the fabric’s surface, where it evaporates and creates a cooling effect that drops the temperature inside the tent by up to 20 degrees F.

Kasani estimates that just a gallon of water can keep a tent cool for up to 24 hours, and the effect will work with either water sourced from a faucet at a campsite or pulled from a stream in a more rural setting. In other words, the evaporative cooling isn’t going to stop working if you don’t use purified clean water.

Although it’s going to be a while before we see this upgraded fabric showing up in camping gear—the material is still in the research phases—according to the university, “industry interest in Kasani’s technology has been high,” and in a few years, if it goes mainstream, it could help make roughing it in high temperatures feel not so rough.