Daohong Liu

Uranus and Neptune have long puzzled scientists: their magnetic fields are heavily tilted and tangled, nothing like Earth's. The answer lay in an exotic form of water — superionic ice, which fills their interiors.

Just as Water changes phase, freezing into ice or evaporating into vapor, forsterite, a key mineral of Earth's mantle, under pressures of hundreds of thousands of atmospheres, reassembles its crystal lattice.