Squeezed between two diamonds, water turned into something never seen on Earth

Inside Neptune and Uranus, water isn't wet — crushed by pressures millions of times stronger than at Earth's surface, it becomes a hot, metallic-like fluid that may drive those planets' magnetic fields. At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Ashkan Salamat's team recreated a sliver of that world by squeezing water between two diamonds to 35 million pounds per square inch and watching with X-rays. Publishing in Communications Chemistry, they found the water's structure does the opposite of what squeezing usually does: instead of becoming more orderly, it drops into a lower-symmetry form never catalogued before. Water, the most familiar substance on Earth, is still keeping secrets.