Physicists have finally filmed a crystal as it melts and discovered that, under the right conditions, it refuses to behave like ordinary ice. Instead of dissolving smoothly into a liquid, this solid passes through a strange in‑between state that challenges what I thought I knew about how matter changes phase. That discovery slots into a broader wave of research on solids that bend the rules, from jelly-like ice cubes that never drip to light itself frozen into a “supersolid” that flows like a liquid.
These experiments are not just curiosities. They hint at future refrigerators that never leak, spacecraft that rely on exotic ice, and quantum devices built from light that acts like a crystal. They also force scientists to revisit some of the most basic assumptions about melting, freezing, and what it even means for something to be solid.
The crystal that refuses to melt like ice
For more than a century, textbooks have treated melting as a universal story: heat a solid, its atoms jiggle harder, and at a critical temperature the rigid lattice collapses into a disordered liquid. When researchers finally captured high resolution footage of a crystal going through this process, they expected to watch that familiar script unfold. Instead, they saw a solid that did not melt like ice at all, but slipped into a distinct intermediate phase that looked neither fully solid nor fully liquid, a behavior that upends the idea that rapid, uniform breakdown is the only way a bulk material can melt.
The work, described as new research offering clearer insight into melting, shows that the transformation can proceed through a strange new phase rather than a simple jump from order to disorder. The team reports that this rapid transformation has long been considered a universal feature of melting in bulk materials, yet their crystal, identified in the summary as Dec, instead revealed a more complex pathway. By proving that this alternative route exists, on camera, they have opened the door to rethinking how engineers model everything from turbine blades to microchips when they approach their thermal limits.
How a graphene “sandwich” let physicists film melting in real time
Capturing this odd behavior required more than a clever theory, it demanded a way to watch atoms rearrange without destroying the sample in the process. To do that, researchers at the University of Cambridge and their collaborators trapped a tiny crystal between two sheets of graphene, creating what they described as a protective “graphene sandwich” that shielded the material from contamination and evaporation. This setup allowed them to heat the crystal and record its atomic structure directly, frame by frame, instead of inferring the process from before‑and‑after snapshots.
By stabilizing the sample in this graphene capsule, the team could follow how the lattice of atoms in the material, referred to in the summary as What and Tha, morphed as it approached its melting point. The approach, in which melting atoms in a protective “graphene sandwich” are recorded directly, made it possible to see the emergence of the strange new phase that sits between solid and liquid. That direct visualization is what lets physicists argue, with confidence, that this crystal’s behavior is not a fluke of theory but a real, observable state of matter.
Jelly Ice, the weird solid that never leaves a puddle
While one group of physicists was watching a crystal melt in an unfamiliar way, another set of researchers was trying to avoid melting altogether. Their answer is Jelly Ice, a squishy, reusable material that keeps things cold without ever turning into a puddle on the floor. Instead of being made from pure water, Jelly Ice is a gel that locks water inside a polymer network, so it behaves like a solid block of ice in a cooler but does not drip as it warms.
Chemists presenting their work in WASHINGTON described how this reusable “jelly ice” can be cut, stacked, and refrozen, and how it could replace traditional ice or single use gel packs in shipping and food storage. In their description, they note that the material, highlighted in a press release that begins “Lea este comunicado de prensa en español,” can be tuned for different applications, from keeping produce fresh to supporting lab grown meat scaffolds, all while avoiding meltwater. The team behind this work reports that their reusable jelly ice can be composted after use, which hints at a future where cold chains are both drier and more sustainable.
From lab bench to jiggling cold packs
Jelly Ice is not just a lab curiosity, it is already being shown off as a practical material that can jiggle like dessert while acting like a freezer pack. At #ACSFall2025, a group of researchers demonstrated their newest version of this material, cutting it into cubes and blocks that can be handled like conventional ice but do not leave condensation rings on tables. The visual of a cooler full of translucent, wobbling cubes drives home how different this solid is from the rigid, crystalline ice we are used to.
In a video labeled “Compostable Frozen Packages That Jiggle,” the American Chemical Society highlighted how these jelly blocks can be used as frozen packaging that keeps food cold and then breaks down after disposal. The clip shows that, at #ACSFall2025, the team emphasized both the compostable nature of the packaging and its ability to be refrozen repeatedly. That combination of performance and end of life design suggests Jelly Ice could move quickly from conference halls into grocery distribution centers and meal kit warehouses.
Crushing water into a new kind of ice
Not all exotic solids are soft. In high pressure labs, scientists have been forcing water into crystal structures that do not exist in your freezer, revealing new forms of ice that only appear when molecules are squeezed to extremes. One of the most intriguing is ice XXI, a phase that forms not by cooling water but by compressing it so intensely that its molecules snap into a new arrangement while still at relatively warm temperatures.
To create this phase, researchers followed a protocol described as Crushing Water into a Crystal. They report that to create ice XXI, they did not cool water, they crushed it, using extreme pressure to force supercompressed water into a metastable state before it transformed into ice VI. The summary notes that They used this method to show that water can briefly occupy this new crystalline form, labeled XXI, which may exist on alien worlds where pressures are far beyond anything on Earth’s surface.
Ice XXI and the expanding family of solid water
The discovery of ice XXI adds yet another entry to the already crowded catalog of ice phases, each with its own geometry and stability range. Scientists have long known that water can freeze into multiple crystalline structures depending on temperature and pressure, but the route through supercompressed liquid into a metastable solid highlights how much complexity is still hidden in this seemingly simple molecule. Ice XXI, in particular, appears as an intermediate that bridges supercompressed water and the better known ice VI, revealing a new step in the phase diagram.
According to a detailed report, Scientists have demonstrated that supercompressed water transforms into ice VI at high pressure, but only after passing through a metastable ice named Ice XXI. That finding, summarized under the heading “New Form of Ice Discovered: Ice XXI,” shows that even in a system as well studied as water, there are still hidden phases that only appear under carefully controlled conditions. For planetary scientists, this matters because it suggests that the mantles of icy moons and exoplanets could host unfamiliar forms of ice that influence how heat and materials move through their interiors.
Why Jelly Ice is a “weird new kind of ice that never melts”
Compared with the crushing pressures that create ice XXI, Jelly Ice operates in a much more familiar regime, yet it is arguably just as strange. It is described as a Weird New Kind of Ice That Never Melts, a phrase that captures how it behaves like a solid block of frozen water while refusing to follow the usual rules of phase change. Instead of melting into liquid, the gel simply warms up and softens, with the water still trapped inside its polymer network.
Coverage of this work notes that scientists made Jelly Ice so that it can be reused and does not melt like regular ice, and that this future of melt free cooling is already here. One report, headlined with the exclamation “What a time to be alive,” emphasizes that Jelly Ice is a Weird New Kind of Ice That Never Melts and that What makes it remarkable is the way it combines the thermal performance of ice with the mechanical feel of a soft gel. For consumers, that could mean picnic coolers that stay dry and medical shipments that arrive without soggy cardboard, all thanks to a solid that sidesteps the classic solid to liquid transition.
Light turned into a supersolid that flows like a liquid
At the opposite extreme from squishy gels and crushed water, physicists have been pushing light itself into a state that behaves like a solid and a liquid at the same time. In carefully engineered experiments, they have created a photonic supersolid, a new state of matter where light waves arrange themselves into a regular pattern like a crystal yet still flow without friction like a superfluid. This hybrid behavior blurs the line between phases and shows that even something as intangible as light can be coaxed into acting like a material object.
A short explainer video captures the surprise of this result with the line that scientists just turned light into a new state of matter called a photonic super solid, and that it behaves in a way that is both ordered and fluid. The clip, titled “Light Becomes a Supersolid?! The Quantum Twist That Let Scientists …,” underscores how this photonic super solid challenges intuition about what counts as a solid. By arranging photons in a cavity so that they interact strongly, researchers can make them form a lattice while still allowing the overall field to flow, a feat that could eventually feed into ultra precise sensors or quantum simulators.
Supersolid light and the biggest X‑ray laser
The creation of a photonic supersolid is part of a broader push to use powerful light sources and ultracold setups to explore exotic phases. Reports describe how the World’s biggest X‑ray laser has been used to discover a never before seen type of ice that is solid at room temperature, and how similar high intensity tools help physicists capture fleeting states where particles interact in unusual ways. In the same family of experiments, researchers have now turned light into a solid that flows like a liquid, extending the supersolid concept from ultracold atoms to photons.
One account explains that Physicists used the World’s biggest X‑ray laser to probe how particles interact with each other in these extreme regimes, while another notes that Supersolid: Scientists turn light into a solid that flows like liquid for first time. In that report, Scientists are quoted describing how this Supersolid state of light, covered by Kapil Kajal and dated to a Wed in early March, behaves in the quantum realm in ways that defy classical expectations. Together, these efforts show that the frontier of “solid” is no longer limited to atoms and molecules, it now includes carefully orchestrated fields of light.
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