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Human taste buds can tell the difference between normal and 'heavy' water
- calibas 6y agoThere's a remarkable spectrum of subtle differences in the way water tastes. Plastic bottles, metal pipes, using a straw, city tap water, spring water, well water, chlorine, filters, they all add a little flavor. In certain cases and depending on the person, human taste and smell is an incredibly accurate chemical detector. https://www.sciencealert.com/this-woman-can-smell-parkinson-s-and-could-be-the-key-to-an-early-detection-test https://www.sciencealert.com/this-woman-can-smell-parkinson-...
- dahfizz 6y agoSometimes it is not very subtle. As someone who grew up on well water, the chlorine taste of any city water is unbearable to me.
- Guest42 6y agoWell water is fantastic. I can notice the difference city to city and have since switched to certain types of bottled water. Making ice cubes with bottled water makes drinks taste differently.
- xxpor 6y agoAs someone who grew up with well water, it tasted fine, but (at least for me based on local conditions), it was a huge pain in the ass. Low pressure, extremely hard to the point where soap is useless and we had to replace things regularly from scale build up, the UV filter thing we had to run in the basement, the worry that one day you could randomly lose the prime on the pump and they'd have to dig to get it back (which happened once), no fluoride so my teeth aren't the best. Give me that carbon filtered (removes the chlorine taste) city water any day :)
- Vrondi 6y agoInstalling a whole-house water softener completely cures this and is very cheap (at least in the USA).
- xxpor 6y agoI've talked to my parents about it multiple times but they're worried about the sodium content.
- zdragnar 6y agoPotassium chloride water softening salt is more expensive, but unless you use way more water than we do, I don't find it to be an unreasonable expense.
- frob 6y agoI've been living in a place with a softener on a well for a while now. Many people have asked about salty water, but I don't find it to be an issue at all. I even prefer water from our softened tap over the unsoftened one. I don't notice rings or residue in my drinking glasses. I think a common misconception is that your water runs through the salt. In reality, the water runs through a filter and the salt water is used to periodically flush the accumulated metals out of the filter. This could lead to some residual salt, but it will get flushed away quickly. The other source of salty water is a busted valve. Replace it and the water will be fine again.
- matmatmatmat 6y ago
- goda90 6y agoIf you want to avoid the cost and trash of bottled water, try keeping a pitcher of water(or reusable water bottles filled from the tap) in your fridge. The chlorine is pretty volatile, and will evaporate off within a day(assuming the pitcher isn't air tight). Just have some rotating stock so you can always have water ready to drink or make ice cubes. Of course you could also go the filtration route, but that adds the upfront cost of the system, and continuous cost of filters and wasted water.
- snovv_crash 6y agoIt depends on the treatment method your city uses. Chlorine gas will evaporate out, but chloramine won't, and will also react with a lot of things downstream to make nasty tasting organics, for example if you use the water in brewing.
- ecpottinger 6y agoThat is why I have a rain fresh filter. Needs no power to run either. http://rainfresh.ca/product/steel-gravity-water-filter/ http://rainfresh.ca/product/steel-gravity-water-filter/
- quickthrower2 6y agoLooks good for prepping as it takes stream water too.
- Scoundreller 6y agoAnd can depend on where in a city you are. And sometimes the different treatment systems are still mained to eachother so shifting demand and supply can change which water you’re drinking from. Toronto has chlorine plants and ozone plants.
- ajuc 6y agoThis is common knowledge among people growing potted plants to use tap water that stood for a few days in open container.
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y agoThese variations are why I brew coffee with distilled water - gives very consistent joe. Have a distilling machine.
- dahfizz 6y agoDo you have a recommendation for a countertop distilling machine? A back of the napkin calculation shows that it would be 50% cheaper for me to pay for the electricity and distill water myself than buy bottled water, but the idea had never occurred to me.
- ecpottinger 6y agoWhile not as good as distilling can I suggest filtering like the rain fresh system uses. I have used them for decades because well water has too much minerals (bad tasting) in this part of Ontario.
- Vrondi 6y agoYeah, I grew up on spring water, and going away to college and city water was excruciating.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fudged71 6y agoThe tap water where I live in Canada is fantastic. But when I'm served filtered water with tap water ice cubes I can tell the difference pretty easily.
- samatman 6y agoIt's not going to be any city water though. Seattle has fantastic city water. Most months of the year, Oakland water is very good (offer not valid for all combinations of reservoir and pipes, your mileage may vary). Also, if you got used to something like iron or calcium enrichment, you might just not like those vintages, even if they're "objectively" good.
- ksaj 6y agoOppositely, I've lived in Toronto for quite a long time, but my family all live in rural Ontario. A bunch of years ago my parents finally got over the fear factor and came to the city to visit. My dad commented specifically that he was impressed at the taste of our tap water, and thought it was an unexpected highlight of the trip. We grew up on well water. Although by this point they were living "in town" so it is possible that their water has more chlorine, etc, than Toronto's. When I visit them, their tap water tastes dull (but not bad) to me, so there is that.
- vmception 6y agobut it isn't a good sanitation or cleanliness detector. people disagree with any water that tastes different than what they are used to and assume its bad. that's pretty much all it comes down to.
- jjk166 6y agoHey, whatever you've been drinking hasn't killed you yet. Really, up until a few generations ago, people tended to stay put and a family might drink from the same set of water sources for centuries. The only reason water would ever taste different is if something bad had happened to it.
- vmception 6y agoI can understand how it is rational, but its just not usually accurate any more
- jfengel 6y agoThe remarkable thing here is that it's not a chemical detection, but a nuclear one. Chemically, H2O and D2O are identical. We knew that our taste buds (and smell receptors) are incredibly sensitive to small amounts of chemicals. It's somewhat unexpected that they could distinguish molecular weights. It may tie in to the Vibrational Theory of Smell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction The standard theory of odor is that it's a lock-and-key process, like the immune system (and related to it). But there are some odd holes in that theory, like why sulfur compounds smell "alike", even though they're different keys fitting different locks (and we can't even exactly say what "alike" means). This one guy suggests that it acts like a spectroscope, sensing the way atoms vibrate within the molecule. It's a brilliant theory that explains a lot of stuff, except that it's completely insane and there's nothing even vaguely like a biological mechanism that would enable it to work. He tried testing it with molecules that substituted deuterium for hydrogen, which alters the spectroscopic signature -- but got mixed results. Smell and taste are only distantly related as mechanisms (taste is actually several very different mechanisms, and that's well-documented). This suggests that there's even more to it than that. Does this bring Luca Turin back? Dunno. He seems to have abandoned smell research entirely.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tomjakubowski 6y ago> Chemically, H2O and D2O are identical. Deuterium is so much heavier than regular hydrogen that the bond lengths in D2O are shortened by enough (~3%) to affect cell chemistry. Also significant differences in boiling points and other physical properties. http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/D2O/D2Oh.htm http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/D2O/D2Oh.htm
- deckar01 6y agoI conducted an experiment once to settle an argument about identifying vodka by smell and taste. The argument was since regulations require 95+% neutral spirits to be diluted with water, the smell and taste should be uniform. We used 3 store bought vodkas reportedly made from potato, corn, or grain and our own mixtures of 95% grain alcohol with various water sources to matching dilution. Participants were allowed to sample the solutions and told what they were, then given the solutions blind in a random order and asked to identify each solution. Our participant group was too small and controls too loose to make any significant conclusions, but our guess was that pH was not regulated and could be a discerning factor. One of the participants scoring a near perfect score settled the bet. Even the smokers scored higher than what we expected for purely random guesses.
- autokad 6y agoI'm still having a hard time trying to understand why you where surprised they weren't uniform. You can add .0001% of something to a food and taste the difference depending on what you added. if someone making a sandwich puts mustard on a sandwich and uses that knife to cut my bread, I can taste the mustard even though they wiped the knife. the % of mustard on my sandwich has to be very, very small.
- deckar01 6y agoThat’s not a very good analogy. It’s more like the concentration of nitrogen in the atmosphere increasing 5% and you being able to smell it. Ethanol is a notoriously overwhelming flavor and the rest of vodka is intended to be flavorless.
- underseacables 6y agoI always thought that water’s taste was its temperature.
- yetihehe 6y agoIt's common meme, but that "taste" is mostly minerals and gases dissolved in water. Temperature only changes our response to them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amelius 6y agoWouldn't that be potentially dangerous to drink, given that lots of these deuterium atoms now become part of your body and have slightly different chemical characteristics than hydrogen atoms?
- Karsteski 6y agoIt is, but only a long period of time. A glass of deuterated water won't do anything to you, but if you drank it for weeks on end you'd have some serious problems
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoYes, it is dangerous to animals and therefore probably humans [EDIT: in sufficient quantities, as OscarCunningham points out in a comment]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Effect_on_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Effect_on_animals
- OscarCunningham 6y agoThe section directly below that says it's fine in small doses but dangerous if drunk continuously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Toxicity_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Toxicity_in_humans I think sinking ice cubes would be a fun party trick.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kaybe 6y agoI could see the physics department doing this, if it wasn't that expensive. They used to have cocktails with dry ice in them - not sure how legal that is, but it's great fun. If you breathe in the vapour you can taste the drink quite strongly already. (Note, if you put too much dry ice the water in your drink will freeze and that can affect the taste quite negatively..)
- 6y ago
- tsovlerg 6y agoCody's Lab - heavy water taste test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXHVqId0MQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXHVqId0MQc TLDR - sweet, has an aftertaste, feels cold on the lips (compared to regular water)
- gcanyon 6y agoMy first thought was, "How is this news, Cody already tested it?" :-)
- xyzzy21 6y agoNothing is deemed true until academia finally arrives at the party. For example marketing and sales don't exist yet per academia's opinion...
- mhh__ 6y agoIs that a bad thing?
- shalmanese 6y agoRemember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSUMBBFjxrY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSUMBBFjxrY
- db48x 6y agoYou’ll also enjoy Thunderf00t’s presentation on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lANjwPzISQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lANjwPzISQw It seems that Cody’s video inspired the research.
- rcxdude 6y agoIt seemed like it was a parallel work: the research had started well before that video was published.
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
- tanvach 6y agoThunderf00t was involved, and he explained how the study was carried out really well https://youtu.be/lANjwPzISQw https://youtu.be/lANjwPzISQw
- ramraj07 6y agoI remember sitting in an APS talk 7 or so years back where the room more or less laughed at a researcher presenting hypotheses on how deuterium detection might be possible in fruitfly proteins. I hated that entire room and what it stood for. Philistines masquerading as professors. No scientific talk which was done systematically should be laughed at like that.
- omgJustTest 6y agoAs an student, ta and undergraduate instructor the one thing that offended me outright was people being discouraged from engaging. 99% of instruction is communication, largely one direction and engagement is the only data to evaluate the effectiveness. To me it reinforces the one correct reason to become a professor: you want to raise the standard of professionals / colleagues in the field by mass education. Your goal is to increase quality across the board, and the only way to be successful is to be a good and engaging communicator. There are networked benefits from creating success for your students.
- ncmncm 6y agoAgreed, the suppression of research in this area, for decades, reveals a fundamental failure in how we as a society conduct science. E.g., now that it turns out that saturated fat is wholly harmless, the past five decades spent failing to investigate why meat consumption really causes circulatory disease is practically criminal. How many early deaths are traceable to this sustained failure? How many, to having continued permitting trans fats in stuff sold as if it were food? How many to oxidized unsaturated fats? People like to insist that science always gets it right in the end, but these corrections are always isolated flukes. The pattern suggests a clear majority never get corrected. mRNA vaccines are just such a fluke; their inventor spent her whole career being spit on. How many died, for lack of mRNA vaccines in past decades when the method could have accelerated vaccine development by years back then, instead of only now? A great fount of suppressed truths must lie dreaming in the work of women and minorities driven from their fields. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc87uvk8GBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc87uvk8GBc
- nobodyandproud 6y ago
- del_operator 6y agoI’ve heard similar things with Lithium isotopes being differentiated by the brain? https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-brain-20161102/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-bra...
- spike021 6y agoYup. My parents live up near San Francisco. Their water comes out of the tap totally clear, tastes "fresh". I've lived in multiple San Jose homes now, including SJSU dorms, and in every one of those, the water came out of the tap cloudy and if you let any dishes/silverware air dry after washing, they have a significant amount of white precipitate on them that becomes impossible to clean off without some kind of mild acid, like vinegar. At my parents house you can get water spots on things but they're typically quite light and easy to clean off. In addition to that, the flavor just tastes very wrong in San Jose. I lived in SJ for 9 years and never got used to it, either. There are some sites that have PPM ratings for different cities in California and it seems like San Jose consistently rates as one of the highest. edit: I was mistaken, please disregard.
- timw4mail 6y agoThat's just hard water
- lurquer 6y agoThat would be a very difficult experiment to design. Whatever process one used to isolate heavy water would invariably affect the concentration of trace amounts of other molecules. While the two samples might taste subtly different, the difference might be due to some mineral picked up (or lost) in the separation process. I wonder how rigorously they controlled for this? Would you run a spectroscopic analysis on both samples to ensure they were identical but for the DO2? And, even then, one would have to wonder whether the density of the liquid may be having some subtle effect on the manner in which contaminants—-even if identical in concentration in both samples—-are being uptook into the taste nerves.
- rcxdude 6y agoThey did very careful distillation of the water (and confirmed it with mass spectroscopy). Check out thunderf00t's video which is linked elsewhere in this thread, it's one of the first things he thought to test (and basically his main contribution to the final results: he spent a month doing pretty painstaking distillation, even after it was already demonstrated not to matter).
- everybodyknows 6y agoNot mentioned in the piece is that a small fraction of naturally-occurring water is "heavy" for a somewhat different reason. Oxygen as well as hydrogen has stable isotopes, O17 and O18. Summary of O16, O17, O18 formation inside massive stars, here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_oxygen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_oxygen
- xyzzy21 6y agoThe paper found that O18 doesn't change the taste to sweet like deuterium does.
- everybodyknows 6y agoThe explanation may have something to do with an extra neutron roughly doubling the mass of a hydrogen atom, whereas two extra neutrons raise the oxygen mass by only 2/16ths or 12.5%.
- Teknoman117 6y agoThey spent like $1000 to obtain water made from O18, which did not have a sweet taste like D2O did. I wonder if D2O(18) would have any flavor difference...
- KMag 6y agoWas the O18 water also extracted from a cascade of electrolysis cells? If so, was it extra low in deuterium? My understanding is that, at least during WWII, Norway had a bunch of hydro power they used for electrolysis to produce hydrogen in order to produce ammonia via the Haber process. Deuterium is accelerated about half as strongly as regular hydrogen in the electrolysis cells. If you connect up your electrolysis cells in series, the small gradient in hydrogen isotopes you get across each cell accumulates across the cascade, and also the regular hydrogen leaves as a gas at a higher rate. At least that's my understanding, which would also imply the end of the cascade that's depleted of deuterium is also enriched in heavy oxygen isotopes.
- xyzzy21 6y agoThunderF00t is 2nd co-author on this paper. He has a video about it that very good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lANjwPzISQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lANjwPzISQw
- DetroitThrow 6y agoThanks for sharing!
- dukeofdoom 6y agoA side effect of improving the taste of tap water would be less soft drink consumption. I hate the taste of chlorine in the water. Its probably bad for you if you bath and shower in it too. Britta Filters for the tap water, and charcoal filter for the shower head are two very inexpensive ways to improve your quality of life. Highly recommend both. And probably some sort of glass bottle for on the go water consumption. I can taste the plastic in water bottles, especially on a hot summer day while it was left in the car.
- Bunglebub 6y agoTaste buds have helped us evolve as humans. In the beginning, the sense of taste helped us test the foods we ate: bitter and sour tastes might indicate poisonous plants or rotting foods. The back of our tongue is sensitive to bitter tastes so we can spit out poisonous or spoiled foods before we swallow them. Sweet and salty tastes let us know foods were rich in nutrients.
- genericlogic 6y agoYou mentioned that 'the back of our tongue is sensitive to bitter'. I believe this is a myth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map
- starpilot 6y agoOddly today there's an obsession with certain bitter substances like caffeine, dark chocolate, and IPA beers.
- lurquer 6y agoThere is no correlation between sweet/bitter and safe/poisonous. Many of the most poisonous berries are sweet. Belladonna is extremely sweet. Much of what is bitter (basically every non-sweet plant out there) is harmless. If you judged the safety of food by taste, I’m afraid you wouldn’t last long in the wild.
- perl4ever 6y ago>Much of what is bitter (basically every non-sweet plant out there) is harmless. But is this a pattern because humans, like other species, find a niche where they can consume something that makes other life forms sick? It's always an advantage to be able to benefit from something others can't, so you're not in direct competition.
- lurquer 6y ago> It's always an advantage to be able to benefit from something others can't, so you're not in direct competition. It is always advantageous to be an omnivore. The more things a creature can consume, the more it will reproduce and the more ‘niches’ it fills. Cockroaches, flies, bacteria, and — through the use of intelligence that enables turning virtually anything into nutritional energy - humans. There is never an ‘advantage’ to limiting ones foods.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoStartup selling d2o bottled water in 3 ... 2 ... 1.
- nicklecompte 6y agoFor me this was the most interesting tidbit: > In tests with mice, however, the animals did not seem to prefer drinking heavy water over regular water, although they did show a preference for sugared water – suggesting that in mice, D2O does not elicit the same sweet taste that people can perceive. I was reminded that rodents also can’t taste aspartame[1], and that in general human taste buds are more finely-tuned than many other mammals (we can detect isomers and many complex bitter chemicals, whereas many other animals can only do the amino acids, sodium, and simple carbohydrates). Having never drank it myself I was wondering if the sweet taste of heavy water is distinctly “artificial” in the way that sucralose/aspartame/etc in water is immediately distinguishable from regular sugar. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature726 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature726
- kazinator 6y agoWouldn't the olfactory bundle above your nose be a number of times larger than an entire rat's brain? Not to mention everything downstream of it ... A lot of the smell sensitivity comes from ("carefully tuned?") positive feedback loops int the olfactory systems which amplify small signals. Or something like that, supposedly. Not my area. At least, not the input side. On the output side of stink, I'm no theorist either; maker, for sure, though!
- nicklecompte 6y agoBut this is specifically not smell, or even about the brain: it’s about what chemicals the tastebuds are physically capable of detecting. In particular the sweet taste of heavy water seems to be purely related to the sweet taste buds (though there may be secondary flavors that come from the smell). Within humans there is considerable variance among bitter tastebuds. Roughly speaking, the salt/sour/sweet tastebuds are comparatively simple ion detectors: salt = sodium, sour = hydrogen (from the acid), and sweet = glucose. And yes, sweet is more complicated, because it’s trying to detect a more complicated form of aquatic solute. But the idea is that these tastes are trying to find a specific and well-defined chemical property. Bitterness is different. Bitterness is basically a poison detector, which means that to be effective it needs to register a wide variety of potential toxins. So akalais/bases tend to be bitter because naturally-occurring bases tend to be toxic. But there are all sorts of complex organic molecules that may be toxic (or are chemically very similar to toxins), which some people can taste and others cannot. Cilantro is probably the most famous example: people who hate cilantro are tasting a (harmless) toxin that other people can’t detect. But this taste is a true taste from the tastebuds, not a smell.
- mandliya 6y agoWhile growing up in a very dry region in India, I remember people get boring wells drilled in their land to extract ground water (sometimes even 1000 feet deep). This ground water often tastes subtly sweet and I remember drinking that water in summer heat, getting this amazing sweet after taste. In fact people go to neighbors who have "meetha pani" (sweet water) for their daily consumption. Not sure if that was D2O and not H2O.
- istjohn 6y agoI wonder if the sweetness could have been caused by lead leaching into the water.
- enkid 6y agoThat's what I was thinking. The Romans would use lead bowls to make their water taste better.
- monkeybutton 6y agoThey used lead vessels to make wine taste sweeter as well. Saying that makes me curious as to what it would actually taste like. Stevia extract and aspartame are sweet but don't taste the same and both different from suger, what is lead like? The second thing that makes me wonder is, do I already know since I live in a city with some lead contamination in the tap water.
- KMag 6y agoDidn't the Romans actually end up making red wine vinegar in the lead pots (letting the wine go bad), and the acetic acid reacted with the lead to form lead acetate (a.k.a. "sugar of lead")?
- arthur2e5 6y agoIt could also be something much more benign like potassium and sodium ions. They are allegedly what make some mineral water sweet.
- aseerdbnarng 6y agoSo is this ability surprising though? As water is essential for surival, the ability to taste when water is 'off' would be a powerful evolutionary tool. This is maybe why water tastes 'like nothing' so we can better tell when there is something wrong with it.
- minitoar 6y agoI always sort of thought it was because we are mostly water.
- goldenkey 6y agoYeah, you would adapt to the taste. But what is the taste of saliva and mucous? I honestly don't know and now I'm curious if it highly varies.
- tomjohnneill 6y agoProvided you gain appropriate consent, there are definitely ways in which you can discover exactly how much the taste of these fluids vary from person to person.
- moralestapia 6y agoFrom empirical evidence, other people's saliva tastes like nothing. Source: Dating.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rcxdude 6y agoIt is pretty suprising!. There's no strong evolutionary reason for being able to taste the difference: there's no natural source of such concentrated D20 and it's only toxic if you ingest a lot of the concentrated stuff. It's not something any animal is going to encounter in nature. And by conventional chemical wisdom D20 and H20 are virtually identical: the electron structure is the same and that basically dictates the chemistry. The only significant difference is the mass of the molecule (about 10% heavier), and experiments with oxygen-18 water (which has the same mass as D20) showed it doesn't taste of anything, so it must be due to very slight changes in structure between the two.
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- kazinator 6y agoPlease do not give me heavy water without asking. I might not have been compiled with CONFIG_D20 support. I can tell you, but with small children, you have to check.
- jdontillman 6y agoI always thought that a nerdy boutique coffee shop that served coffee brewed with heavy water would make for an interesting business.
- eloff 6y agoThat's really amazing that human taste buds are such sensitive chemical detectors. We still can't build anything as good at anything near that size. Off-topic: Is anyone else reminded of that episode of Hogan's Heroes where the Germans store heavy water in the POW camp to protect it from allied bombers, and Hogan tricks Colonol Klink into drinking the heavy water by telling him it had some kind of health benefit? https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/584201382887878852/ https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/584201382887878852/
- DebtDeflation 6y agoEven more amazing - under certain conditions, the human eye can detect single photons.
- nraynaud 6y agoThe TLDR is that also chemistry is mostly about electric charges, actually speed plays a role in which reaction is favored when there are competing reactions, and reaction rate decreases with mass. Hydrogen being very small, one neutron makes a big mass difference, so it's the most susceptible to mass change.
- cromka 6y agoUnrelated to water heaviness, while not the hardest, NYC tap water always tested sweet to me. I love that taste. It's amazing how used I got to it, to the point that drinking tap water anywhere else feels like some sort of punishment. It really made me realize after living outside of NYC how infrequently New Yorkers actually buy bottled water. BTW: "New York City department of environmental protection is one of the 5 municipalities in the US that is allowed to supply unfiltered water based on their water quality, and the water is well known for its fresh taste (which is based on the absence of chlorine, a chemical often used for water treatment)."
- schrodinger 6y agoOur water is so good! Isn’t that related to our bagel quality too?
- rmujica 6y agoand pizza crust!
- thehappypm 6y agoand my axe!
- astrea 6y agoI couldn't wrap my head around how such a polluted city could have such clean water and found this: "New York City drinking water springs from 125 miles away in the Catskill Mountains -- 90% of the water comes from the Catskill/Delaware watershed, where waters from tributary rivers collect in 19 reservoirs. The other 10% comes from smaller watersheds in Westchester and Rye -- all of it traveling through vast underground aqueducts to supply the city’s residents."
- dreamcompiler 6y agoNYC tap water is astonishingly good. Not just better than you'd expect for a big dirty city, but better than you'd expect from a pristine mountain glacier in Norway. It's because of those giant underground tunnels that bring in the water fresh from far away in upstate NY. It's the best tap water I've tasted in the US.