Royston Posted May 9, 2006 Posted May 9, 2006 As most of you probably know, surfaces on the atomic scale are not smooth, so if two bodies are brought together there will be tiny gaps. Water can condense and fill these gaps using the technique below. So for practical purposes water can now be used as a 'safe' glue. This is pretty weird. It turns out that water can freeze at room temperature in response to atomic-scale friction. Joost Frenken and others at Leiden University used an instrument called a friction force microscope to create nano-friction by dragging a tungsten wire over a graphite surface. They wanted to test the theory that water vapour in the air might condense and become ice. And it did. http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2006/05/freezing-water-at-room-temperature.html
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