Nebraska
41.5000°N -100.0000°W · Q1553
3 English words in this atlas trace back to Nebraska. It sits in United States.
It is the rare ice that shrinks rather than expands when it freezes.
Xiao Cheng Zeng's group at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln predicted the phase in 1997 from simulations of water squeezed into a gap less than a nanometer wide. Experimental work at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory confirmed it in 2009. The nickname comes from the university's own announcements, which played on how flat the stuff is.
An adjective that exists for exactly one molecule, carrying the name of the state where it was identified.
Nebraskanic acid, twenty-four carbons long with two hydroxyl groups, was described in 2018 alongside wuhanic acid by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan. The plant is a Chinese mustard relative grown as an ornamental. Interest in the oil is industrial: hydroxy fatty acids of this kind behave like the ricinoleic acid of castor oil, which is used in lubricants and coatings.
It has a twin called wuhanic acid, because two laboratories shared the discovery.
A team led by Edgar Cahoon at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, working with Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, reported both fatty acids in Nature Plants in 2018 and named them for their own cities. The source plant, Orychophragmus violaceus, is grown in China as a vegetable and an ornamental. Its oil cut friction between metal surfaces far more effectively than castor oil in tests, which makes it a candidate lubricant.