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Author: Subject: Zinc cyanide expands when pressure applied
vmelkon
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[*] posted on 15-6-2013 at 09:07
Zinc cyanide expands when pressure applied


This is from a news article.
Title : New material expands when you squeeze it
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/geekquinox/weird-science-week...

Since Yahoo deletes their news stories after a few days, I will post the text here.

Quote:
This sounds a bit like a paper-towel commercial, but scientists have come up with a new material that actually gets bigger and less dense when you squeeze it.

If you think you can't get from the left one to the right one by squeezing, you might be wrongThe scientists spent years testing this out, just to be sure they weren't all going through some shared delusion, but every test showed the same thing. When they applied pressure to zinc cyanide — mainly used in electroplating — it didn't compact down and get more dense, like you'd expect something put under pressure to do. Instead, the material completely rearranged itself, opening up into a more porous structure.

"It's like squeezing a stone and forming a giant sponge," said Karena Chapman, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory, said in a statement. "Materials are supposed to become denser and more compact under pressure. We are seeing the exact opposite."

This very strange, but very cool discovery will allow scientists to create a host of new porous materials, for anything from new water filters, carbon dioxide traps and chemical sensors, to new ways of delivering drugs.
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papaya
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[*] posted on 15-6-2013 at 10:34


Now a question I would like to ask them(because they speak about density): what will be the volume change if I compress it in a closed space, positive ? Well that cannot be true... :P
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[*] posted on 15-6-2013 at 11:44


Rather more detail here
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja4012707
including the answer to papaya's question.
If you squeeze it in the absence of water or methanol it squashes like you would expect.
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