freeze

Today I learned that some Russian scientists made a polymer sheet thingy that, by providing a handy matrix, helps water freeze solid instead of making slush and chunks. You could theoretically dump a bunch of this stuff out of an airplane and get parts of the Arctic to stop coming apart, and then the increased ice will reflect more sunlight, and we'll get out of the feedback loop whereby the more ice you melt, the faster the rest of it melts.

I must admit that this kind of research sounds terribly entertaining to conduct (to this nerd anyway), but it makes me imagine the mariner guy from Waterworld floating around on a nifty boat made of fancy polymer sheets. Or, better yet, some future researcher trying to crack the code his ancestors left on those high-tech stone tablets.