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Scientists found ice with a 304-molecule repeating pattern

Ellsworth Toohey
Apr 29, 2026
∙ Paid

Leigh Prather/shutterstock.com

Ice-9, in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, is a fictional polymorph of water that stays solid at room temperature and converts every drop it touches into more of itself. Real ice doesn’t work that way, but the underlying idea — that water takes radically different crystalline forms — is legitimate science. Researchers have cataloge…

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