This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Adam Levy.

Water molecules can arrange themselves to form much larger structures.

Take intricate snowflakes which form all by themselves in the right conditions.

Well now researchers have created some delicate water structures of their own in the form of microscopic ice mazes with a little help from light.

The team took some sugar water and kept it at a temperature where ice crystals and water happily coexist.

They then expose the H2O to infrared light of a frequency that is absorbed much more easily by the ice

crystals than it is by the water.

We thought that something interesting will happen when you illuminate ice which

absorb more than water because once the ice is melting, then it's become liquid water and then it's absorbed less.

So you have kind of a negative feedback situation and we did not know what will happen with this.

Physicist Edo Braslowski from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The heating caused by the light melted tiny holes in the crystals.

These holes sometimes joined up to form channels and the

researchers watched as a labyrinth-like pattern gradually formed over the course of an hour.

And at some point we suddenly saw a whole spectrum of patterns that appear.

There were holes that are open and closed, there were channels that was

a appearing and all together we realized that we found a new phenomena which was not observed before.

The researchers have published their findings in the journal Science Advances.

And cool as all this may sound, there may also be some icy applications for this technique.

Defrosting may make you think of microwave ovens, but heating ice with microwaves has some drawbacks.

The microwave actually warmed the water but not the ice.

So here we have a system which we warmed the ice even more than the water. And because the shorter wavelength infrared light

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