HELMAND PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN – JULY 21: A KBR (UK) employee test for the bacteriological content in a sample of water at the water testing laboratory, at the Camp Bastion Water Bottling Plant on July 21, 2008 at the British Army base in Camp Bastion in the Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The Bastion Water Bottling Plant supplies and delivers bottled drinking water and bulk drinking water for all of the coalition forces and contractors that live and work in Camp Bastion. The water’s also supplied to the Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) by road or air drop via the military chain.The bottling plant has its own Water Testing Laboratory where it is tested according to European Directive. Mainly workers are from Sri Lanka and Nepal and are employed in the plant that has been open now for about 22 weeks and has produced 2,634,284 litres of bottled drinking water, of which 2,512,180 litres have already been delivered to the troops on the ground. (Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images)
Remember when Metallica's Death Magnetic was crowned "Loudest Album Ever?" Well this is even louder than that. Much, much louder.
CNET reports that researchers at Stanford University's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory created an underwater sound that was so loud the water was immediately boiled and evaporated. How did they do it? With an X-ray laser. They blasted tiny jets of water with the laser, which vaporized the water molecules instantly.
Here's what we're wondering: is there a practical application to this? Can Metallica, say, use the X-ray in the studio and record the sound of the instantly-vaporized water? Is it too loud to record? Will we need earplugs? We could be standing at the edge of a brand new sub-genre of heavy metal: heavy water!
