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Five things we still don’t know about water
- onos 5y agoThe two phases of super cooled water dispute seems to have been due to a coding error. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20180822a/full/ https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.2018082...
- alephnan 5y ago> What could we not know about water? It’s wet! It’s not. Things that have water on them are wet, water is not.
- mirekrusin 5y agoIs melting ice cube wet?
- alephnan 5y agoAs you say, it's an ice cube, not a water cube, so yes.
- mirekrusin 5y agoSo cloud is not wet unless it is partially frozen then it becomes wet when freezing, right?
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoWater almost always has water on it. It’s extraordinarily rare to interact with a single H2O molecule. Therefore, the overwhelming majority of water is wet.
- jabthedang 5y agowhere our oceans came from.
- SeanFerree 5y agoVery interesting!
- bartvk 5y agoPretty cool article. The five described points are: 1) the kinds of ice 2) phase transition between two liquid forms of water 3) three unclear points about evaporation 4) the pH value of the surface of waterfalls and 5) quantum mechanical effects of nanoconfined water. Highly worth reading, and it's a pretty easy read, too.
- ncmncm 5y agoI love articles like this. Different branches of science have different relationships with their unknowns. Cosmologists will forever revile anybody who mentions something they don't know, if it conflicts with something they like to think they do know. But biologists are always eager to talk about things nobody knows about biology. The public would be much better served by carefully curated lists of what doesn't fit, illustrating the boundaries of understanding, than by overconfident descriptions of (e.g.) the first .001 seconds of the universe's existence. I just found out that inflation necessarily predates big bang, but nobody can guess by how much.
- feoren 5y ago> inflation necessarily predates big bang A tangent, but how can anything pre-date the big bang? Time itself is supposed to have been created at that point. Did you mean inflation necessarily follows a big bang?
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoNo. There is a (IIUC, recently floated, and non mainstream) theory that inflation did in fact precede the big bang. No, I don't understand how that's possible, or even a meaningful statement. There was an article on it here on HN, almost certainly within the last month. I don't recall more.
- chaps 5y agoOne of the theories is that inflationary cosmology leads to inflationary cosmology: where one universe's big bang's inflation leads to pockets of inflation that can extend beyond the universe they came from -- effectively creating their own universe. Then a big bang extends from that, which repeats into their own inflationary systems, which repeats into their own system, etc. It's a theory from the 80s IIRC.
- sigg3 5y agoMy firefox gives me warnings about this page.
- bartvk 5y agoWorks for me. Latest FF version, running on latest version of macOS.
- Hokusai 5y agoSo we may still find some day ice-nine like the one found in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Or do we know that it's impossible?
- dr_dshiv 5y agoThe pressures required for those ices make them unstable and, thankfully, unable to freeze the ocean.
- mietek 5y agoTangential, but — have you heard about vacuum decay? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI
- nawgz 5y agoIt would seem to me some laws of thermodynamics would prevent any such "infection"-style reaction, but I am not a physicist nor chemist.
- tomrod 5y agoThere is some debate in a certain context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo Entertaining too!
- sp332 5y agoSupercooled water shows this kind of reaction with normal ice.
- nawgz 5y agoRight, but that "supercooled water" can only make such a reaction because, thermodynamically speaking, someone intentionally injected energy into it without changing its state, thus enabling the reaction to occur within the bounds of the energy delta created, and ending when that ends. I do not see how a molecule could be stable in some condition, and then when making contact with something else, result in nothing other than a cascading state-change of that other. It doesn't make sense.
- jamestimmins 5y agoThis needs a 2015 tag
- k__ 5y agoAnything new about these 5 points since then?
- dr_dshiv 5y agoRabbit hole alert: Ho, M. W. (2014). Large supramolecular water clusters caught on camera-A review. Water, 6, 1-12. https://www.academia.edu/6280471/Large_supramolecular_water_clusters_caught_on_camera https://www.academia.edu/6280471/Large_supramolecular_water_... This is around the very controversial question of whether amorphous water can have a structure. Controversy, because homeopathy. Pretty pictures, though!
- steve_avery 5y agoLink broken! Sad
- dr_dshiv 5y agoThis is another rabbit hole: using EMF to dissociate H&O in saltwater, making it appear to burn. Like, electrode less electrolysis—but damn cool that radio waves can do this! Rao, M. L., Sedlmayr, S. R., Roy, R., & Kanzius, J. (2010). Polarized microwave and RF radiation effects on the structure and stability of liquid water. Curr. Sci, 98(11), 1500-1504.
- paulpauper 5y agotritium is fascinating. it's water but radioactive.
- HideousKojima 5y agoTritium is hydrogen, not water
- rprenger 5y agoDo you mean tritiated water?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water
- foobarbecue 5y agoI love this straightforward writing style.
- entropie 5y agoI don't have an subscripton or something, but articles from nautil.us with topics that interested me were always excellent. This one too.
- Giorgi 5y agoComments section is nuts, someone is pushing device that allegedly can turn water into... crude oil.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoNow that’s just silly. My device turns water directly into gasoline, so you can save yourself the expense of building an oil refinery.
- dluan 5y agoMost biological perspectives think that water behaves a certain way, which is like bulk water, when in fact at certain scales it behaves very differently, especially at interfaces and surfaces. For example, it's possible to draw flow across a charged surface where you can use it to effectively purify or separate water from things floating in it. This is useful when trying to filter out baddies like viruses and bacteria. I was working in a research lab that was trying to do work re-examining these fundamental assumptions in a bioengineering context, but it often was difficult to not get dismissed by the academic establishment and put in the looney bucket, especially when Luc Montagnier left such a sour taste in a lot of peoples minds. Oh well. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
- ghostbrainalpha 5y agoI bet when you told people about your work, you had some actual loonies get reaaal excited to. There is something about water that tickles the imagination in a way conductive to spiritual/magical thinking. When I read in an Ian Banks novel that Water would form ice under sufficient pressure from gravity regardless of temperature, making hot ice possible....
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago>Science moves forward one funeral at a time. Sometime it also regresses one funeral at a time.
- anitil 5y agoBecause I had to look it up : > 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) > During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier was a promoter of the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created in, and thereafter escaped from a laboratory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier
- gsich 5y agoConsidering the Chinese response to that: Not unlikely.
- calebm 5y agoTo add one more to the list: where does all the water on earth come from?
- yakshaving_jgt 5y agoExplosions in space.
- watersb 5y agoI did a research paper on water, just a freshman class literature review, and... wow. Quasicrystals? Ha! At small periods in time and space, I got the (probably mistaken) impression that water could form glass or metal or crystal: order at some scale, disorder at larger scale, the whole complex could itself repeat. Or not.
- amelius 5y agoAlso interesting: https://sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-earth-has-lost-a-quarter-of-its-water/1462713 https://sciencenordic.com/chemistry-climate-denmark/the-eart... > The Earth has lost a quarter of its water > In its early history, the Earth's oceans contained significantly more water than they do today. A new study indicates that hydrogen from split water molecules has escaped into space.
- ars 5y agoInterestingly we are creating lots more water on earth - all the oil we burn has water as an exhaust, which adds to the amount of water on earth. I would suspect it's an insignificant amount, except the CO2 isn't, so maybe it's more than I expect.
- dotancohen 5y agoTangentially related, go watch a Delta IV launch. The RS-68 burns hydrogen, therefore the exhaust plume is literally water. The space shuttle orbiters also burned hydrogen, but the SRBs burned aluminum. I used to enjoy pointing out the difference in their plumes, which is very clear to see as the orbiter's plume is invisible whereas the SRBs are distinctly orange.
- asdff 5y agoWe aren't creating water out of nothing though
- dr_dshiv 5y agoWater vapor is a greenhouse gas; contributes to bout 60% of the greenhouse effect. https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesciencenarratives/its-water-vapor-not-the-co2.html https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesci...
- westurner 5y agoBut where did the water come from? Neptune? Europa? Comet(s)? Is it just the distance to our nearest star in our habitable zone here that results in liquid water being likely? From the article: > But the exact mechanism for how water evaporates isn’t completely understood. The evaporation rate is traditionally represented in terms of a rate of collision between molecules, multiplied by a fudge factor called the evaporation coefficient, which varies between zero and one. Experimental determination of this coefficient, spanning several decades, has varied over three orders of magnitude. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation : > Evaporation is a type of vaporization that occurs on the surface of a liquid as it changes into the gas phase.[1] The surrounding gas must not be saturated with the evaporating substance. When the molecules of the liquid collide, they transfer energy to each other based on how they collide with each other. When a molecule near the surface absorbs enough energy to overcome the vapor pressure, it will escape and enter the surrounding air as a gas.[2] When evaporation occurs, the energy removed from the vaporized liquid will reduce the temperature of the liquid, resulting in evaporative cooling.[3]
- gennarro 5y agoYou can also learn a lot, albeit of a more practical nature, at https://mytapwater.org https://mytapwater.org. Drinking is the more important, and one of the least considered uses of water for most of us.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y agoTsk, no Vonnegutian ice-nine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle "Festivities for the narrator's presidential inauguration begin, but during an air show performed by San Lorenzo's fighter planes, one of the planes malfunctions and crashes into the seaside palace, causing Monzano's still-frozen body to fall into the sea. Instantly, all the water in the world's seas, rivers, and groundwater transforms into solid ice-nine. The freezing of the world's oceans immediately causes violent tornadoes to ravage the Earth, but the narrator manages to escape with Mona to a secret bunker beneath the palace. When the initial storms subside after several days, they emerge. Exploring the island for survivors, they discover a mass grave where all the surviving San Lorenzans committed suicide by touching ice-nine from the landscape to their mouths on the facetious advice of Bokonon, who has left a note of explanation. Displaying a mix of grief for her people and resigned amusement, Mona promptly follows suit and dies."
- akomtu 5y agoWhat I've never understood is how the atomic nuclei has such influence on macroscopic chemical properties. The only useful property of the nuclei is its charge - an integer number, so all macroscopic effects should be completely defined by that integer alone, and all properties of water are sufficiently described by just three numbers - 1, 8, 1 (in any order).
- Nemrod67 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_configuration short version: the electrons assemble in asymmetric layers, conferring properties to the atoms. Thus the atoms on the same columns having comparable properties by having the same layers occupied by electrons. and that's the "I flunked the exam" version, I'm sure this level of explanation is ridiculously simplified compared to the real deal ;)
- tcpekin 5y agoThe number of available valence shell electrons, not the atomic nuclei is typically the controlling factor for macroscale chemical properties of elements. This typically is in balance with the nucleus' positive charge, but does not have to be. Water molecules are molecules, and therefore have a more complex electronic structure than atoms, and therefore is harder to describe, especially at the extremes.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoWhat I did not know is that because hydrogen has various isotopes such as deuterium (D) and tritium (T), some rarer forms of water exist. In addition to ordinary water (H2O), you can have semi-heavy water (HDO), heavy water aka deuterized water (D2O) and super heavy water aka tritiated water (T2O). Tritiated water is radioactive.
- Someone 5y agoThere’s also HTO and DTO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopologue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopologue) and Oxygen has 3 stable and 13 unstable isotopes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_oxygen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_oxygen), so many more variations exist.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y agoThe real concern is: what are we going to do with all the dihydrogen monoxide that has been repeatedly found in our water supply? At certain dosages this chemical is toxic to humans, and in some chemical states it can even cause severe burns.
- peter_retief 5y agoUnderstatement but water makes life possible on earth. Water's properties of ice floating and heat latency etc etc which otherwise would have made life impossible.
- thih9 5y agoThe "five" in the title seems arbitrary and clickbaity. I'd prefer just "Things we still don’t know about water".
- yunobcool 5y agoNot sure if this ties into the third point about how water evaporates, but the Mpemba effect is another cool mystery about water.