ice-nine

“Cat's Cradle," too, from 1963, was a recognizable apocalypse story, in which the world comes to an end through one disastrous invention, "ice-nine," a crystal that sets off a chain reaction in all the water of the world, including the water in human bodies.”

The Wall Street Journal: And So It Went

“This leads him to the children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the inventors of the A-bomb who, as it turns out, later created ice-nine, a substance capable of freezing the entire world.”

The Huffington Post: Greg Mitchell: Writers and The Bomb: Novel Takes on the Nuclear Age

“Felix Hoeniker, who invents a substance "ice-nine" that can freeze water at room temperature.”

The Huffington Post: Donald Kaul: The Dangers of Nuclear 'Ice-Nine'

“But nuclear energy is our Frankenstein monster, which might prove as uncontrollable as ice-nine.”

The Huffington Post: Donald Kaul: The Dangers of Nuclear 'Ice-Nine'

“I put down my book, and thoughts of ice-nine completely left my mind as I placed my hands palms down on the bright blue plastic of the folding table, anticipating something, something loud and awful, but not sure what.”

Fictionaut: All Falls Down

“Possible candidates for an LHC apocalypse include a micro black hole, a magnetic monopole, the incredibly cool vacuum metastability event, or the creation of a strangelet, which could in turn result in an "ice-nine" disaster scenario.”

Large Hadron Malarkey

“A 'ice-nine' event could occur if we create a strangelet on Earth.”

Question on Strangelets

“As for using algae to fix the problem, living on the Chesapeake Bay and seeing the effects of algae blooms on all other life in the Bay, that solution is about as short-sighted as using ice-nine to stop the polar ice melt…”

The Return of the Northwest Passage « Lean Left

“Like the fictitious substance ice-nine in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel "Cat's Cradle," a seed of which set off a chain reaction that transformed all the world's water into ice, Lehman's failure froze credit markets, said Simon Johnson, a finance professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

Statesman - AP Sports