A bunch of interesting facts in here. Obvious in retrospect, but I had never considered the fact that in order to measure the hardness of a material, you need

A bunch of interesting facts in here. Obvious in retrospect, but I had never considered the fact that in order to measure the hardness of a material, you need something harder with which to indent it. And when you do have a harder material, you unlock new possibilities, like this: > Already Dubrovinskaia and her colleagues have applied this to study osmium, a metal that is among the most resistant to being compressed in the world. They found it could resist compression pressures of over 750 GPa. At this point, the inner electrons, which are normally tightly bound to the nucleus of the metal atom and are highly stable, began to interact with each other. The researchers believe this strange behaviour could lead the metal to change from being a solid into a previously unknown state of matter. They hope to investigate what properties this gives osmium in the future.