But there are at least 15 other states, and a team of scientists recently reported a new phase that could be a game changer for the way we use and produce energy.

Most of the time, we can easily distinguish between a solid, liquid, and gas simply by using our eyes. But material scientists who study these three states as well as the more bizarre examples — like plasmas, colloids, and Bose-Einstein condensates — take a deeper look at the properties of each phase, such as density, chemical composition, and conductivity.

When an international team of physicists , chemists, and material scientists tested the phase properties of a new type of material that they had created in the lab, they discovered something they had never seen before: A substance that exhibited the properties of an insulator, superconductor, metal, and magnet all in one. They published their results in the journal Science Advances on April 17.