[HN Gopher] Five Things We Still Don't Know About Water
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Five Things We Still Don't Know About Water
Author : Anon84
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-10-19 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| gennarro wrote:
| You can also learn a lot, albeit of a more practical nature, at
| https://mytapwater.org. Drinking is the more important, and one
| of the least considered uses of water for most of us.
| watersb wrote:
| I 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.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Tsk, no Vonnegutian ice-nine:
| 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."_
| amelius wrote:
| Also interesting:
|
| 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.
| bartvk wrote:
| Pretty 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| ncmncm wrote:
| "Surprise: the Big Bang isn't the beginning of the universe
| anymore". Ethan Siegel, Starts with a Bang.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851641
|
| I can't tell whether this is just, "Actually having started
| with the Big Bang implies a singularity, which isn't
| allowed, so let's assume it wasn't a singularity and take
| what we get then."
| knodi123 wrote:
| > Time itself is supposed to have been created at that
| point
|
| _Our_ space-time began at the big bang. Even decades ago,
| Stephen Hawking was talking about it like "Since events
| before the big bang can have no observational consequences,
| we _might as well_ leave them out of our discussion and
| simply say that time began at the big bang. "
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No. 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.
| sigg3 wrote:
| My firefox gives me warnings about this page.
| bartvk wrote:
| Works for me. Latest FF version, running on latest version of
| macOS.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Rabbit 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_...
|
| This is around the very controversial question of whether
| amorphous water can have a structure. Controversy, because
| homeopathy. Pretty pictures, though!
| steve_avery wrote:
| Link broken! Sad
| ljf wrote:
| https://www.academia.edu/6280471/Large_supramolecular_water_.
| ..
|
| Or if that doesn't work for some reason just search the term
| the parent above posted. Was the first results for me.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Fixed :)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| This 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.
| Hokusai wrote:
| So 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?
| tomrod wrote:
| You may find this Kurzgesagt entertaining. Not explicitly ice-
| nine, but related.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo
| nawgz wrote:
| It would seem to me some laws of thermodynamics would prevent
| any such "infection"-style reaction, but I am not a physicist
| nor chemist.
| tomrod wrote:
| There is some debate in a certain context:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo
|
| Entertaining too!
| sp332 wrote:
| Supercooled water shows this kind of reaction with normal
| ice.
| nawgz wrote:
| Right, 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| The issue occurs if the new state is inherently lower
| energy. This is already the case with prions.
| mietek wrote:
| Tangential, but -- have you heard about vacuum decay?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The pressures required for those ices make them unstable and,
| thankfully, unable to freeze the ocean.
| erehweb wrote:
| There's an anecdote that Vonnegut was talking to a scientist at
| a party and explained the idea for Ice-9. The scientist went
| pale and sat in a corner for a couple of hours staring into
| space in deep thought, after which he stood up with a smile and
| said "No, it's impossible".
| jabthedang wrote:
| where our oceans came from.
| calebm wrote:
| To add one more to the list: where does all the water on earth
| come from?
| entropie wrote:
| I don't have an subscripton or something, but articles from
| nautil.us with topics that interested me were always excellent.
|
| This one too.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| This needs a 2015 tag
| k__ wrote:
| Anything new about these 5 points since then?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I love this straightforward writing style.
| Giorgi wrote:
| Comments section is nuts, someone is pushing device that
| allegedly can turn water into... crude oil.
| paulpauper wrote:
| tritium is fascinating. it's water but radioactive.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Tritium is hydrogen, not water
| rprenger wrote:
| Do you mean tritiated water?:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritiated_water
| dluan wrote:
| Most 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.
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| >Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
|
| Sometime it also regresses one funeral at a time.
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(page generated 2021-10-19 23:00 UTC)