It’s not easy to surprise physicists with a phase change. Yet when Tom White first reviewed the data from a new experiment that used lasers to heat gold, he had to pause and double-check his results.

Researchers have been able to heat up a sample of solid gold to over 14 times its melting temperature for a fraction of a second, bypassing a theoretical limit known as the entropy catastrophe. The ...

Many non-metals have low melting and boiling points. When non-metals are in a solid state, they are usually brittle so you can’t beat them into shape. Metalloids.