Article: Unworldy pressures: scientists put the supersqueeze on gases, metals and minerals.

Unwordly Pressures

By squishing materials in the clenched jaws of a diamond vise, scientists are striving to achieve the ultimate tight squeeze. In so doing, at least one team may have pinched a new record for the largest pressures ever sustained in a laboratory -- super-squeezes soiintense that they apparently exceed even the colossal pressures exerted at the center of the Earth.

Attaining these exotically high pressures intthe lab enables geophysicists to mimic conditions deep within the Earth and other planets, and provides physicists with valuable experimental checks onttheories about atomic and molecular behavior.

In the December 1990 ...

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