Scientists turn water into shiny metal
With enough pressure, you can turn anything into metal, and water is no exception. However, scientists Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague managed to turn liquid water into a bronze-like metallic state without having to apply ungodly amounts of pressure, which makes the achievement all the more impressive. If squeezed together tightly enough, atoms and molecules can become so compacted in their lattice that they begin to share their outer electrons, allowing them to travel and basically conduct electricity as they would in a copper wire. Case in point, in 2020, French scientists turned the simplest gas in the universe, hydrogen, into a metal and fulfilled a prediction made in 1935 by Nobel Prize laureates Eugene Wigner and Hillard Bell Huntington. Metal hydrogen is, in fact, a superconductor, meaning it conducts electricity with zero electrical resistance. To do so, the French researchers subjected hydrogen to a staggering 425 gigapascals of pressure — more than four million times