A team of theorists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has solved a long-standing puzzle in the nucleation of a high-pressure phase of ice known as ice VII, which is believed to exist near the core of “ocean world” planets recently detected outside of the solar system, and has recently been discovered to exist within the Earth’s mantle. “By dissecting the thermodynamics and kinetics of interfaces, there are entirely new classes of problems that can be studied and, ultimately, controlled. A holy grail is to design self-regulating dynamic systems and machines that can utilize far-from-equilibrium dissipative dynamics to perform complex tasks, as in biological systems — control of nucleation is a step on this path.”