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This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

There's solid and there's liquid. And now there's something in between, called chain melt.

At an atomic level, you have this interaction and this mix up between liquid and solid.

Andreas Herman is a condensed matter physicist at the University of Edinburgh. What he and his

team have discovered, using computer simulations, is that under certain pressures and temperatures,

potassium can be both liquid and solid at the same time. Specifically, they squashed simulated

potassium atoms with really extreme pressures, 200 to 400,000 atmospheres.

That's at least 200 times greater than the pressure in the depths of the Mariana Trench.

At that pressure, the atoms form two interlocking crystal lattices.

Add heat to that, you don't need too much, just a little bit above the boiling point of water,

and one of those lattices begins to melt,

while the other remains solid.

And voila, chain melt.

The details are in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Herman says there's no reason to stop at potassium either.

Half a dozen other elements have this crystal structure, too.

As for what we'll do with them? So we haven't really looked for any application. It's quite a fundamental research, I would say.

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