Burning Waste With Water...

That's right, burning waste using good ole H2O.  Yep, instead of putting out fires, NASA is experimenting on using water to burn liquid waste aboard the ISS.

Now I know you are saying that the last time you heard, water put out flames, but researchers have found a "super-critical" water that promotes combustion instead of halting it.     Researchers were able to create this "super-critical" water by compressing the fluid to 217 times that of  air pressure found at sea level and then heating the water to above 703 degrees Fahrenheit.  At that point, the water is neither liquid, solid or gas, researchers describe it as more of a liquid-like gas, that reacts when mixed with organics, oxidizing or "burning" the material, all without flames.  By-products are water and carbon dioxide.


Check out the Popular Science video below:

Neutron Stars can create impossible matter

Hey, want ta get ya mind twisted sideways? Lets talk about "super-fluids". One of the strangest things I have ever read about. A super-fluid really isn't....a fluid that is, not in the traditional sense. Super-fluids are theoretical matter that does things normal matter could not. A super-fluid happens when viscosity drops to zero and thermal conductivity becomes infinite. That means that it would be totally frictionless and could flow in ANY direction and while flowing it would have the exact same temperature throughout the "fluid". First weird thing? I could not be held in any kind of traditional container as we know them. Because it could flow up as easily as flowing across.

It goes without saying that the creations of these exotic materials takes an inordinate amount of pressure and energy. Lot of energy. One place that could support a form of super-fluid would be a neutron star (the remnants of a collapsed super giant star) and luckily there wold be indications this was taking place. Losing energy (brightness) and emitting neutrinos is a dead giveaway.

From the IO9 article:

• Cassiopeia A supernova fits this bill perfectly - since its discovery in 1999, the neutron star has lost 20% of its brightness and about 4% of its temperature. That's incredibly rapid temperature loss, and the best explanation for it is the creation of neutron super-fluids inside the star.

We are not likely to see super-fluids created anytime soon in the lab. The fantastic pressures and relatively low temperatures are still beyond our technical expertise.

Read the IO9 article for more info