"Metallic Hydrogen: Here Today, Gone Tomorrowhhfarang wrote:"Hydrogen Has Been Turned To Metal, And It's About To Change The World
Metallic hydrogen is one of the holy grails of modern science. It would essentially be a magic material, creating everything from impossibly fast computers to hovering cars (themselves powered by hydrogen) to batteries that never need charging. It was also supposed to be impossible, as it would require pressures you can’t even find at the center of the Earth. But, now, amazingly, two Harvard scientists have reportedly pulled it off.
Last month, two researchers from Harvard University created waves in the field of condensed-matter physics when they claimed they had succeeded in creating an extremely exotic substance called metallic hydrogen. Their achievement, the researchers said, confirmed that this substance — the metallic form of an element that, under normal conditions, is a gas — did really exist outside of theory books.
The sample of metallic hydrogen these researchers created was being stored at temperatures close to absolute zero in a diamond vice. But it has now been revealed that the sample has either degraded or been misplaced.
“Basically, it's disappeared,” Isaac Silvera, a professor of the natural sciences at Harvard, who was one of the scientists involved in the creation of the sample, told ScienceAlert in a report published Wednesday. “It's either someplace at room pressure, very small, or it just turned back into a gas. We don't know.” ..."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/metallic-hyd ... 07358.html