[Still revising this post]
Water Structure — otherwise a highly abstruse subject –washed up on the public consciousness a while back, with hundreds of bottled brands on the shelves of WholeFoods, all touting “clustered / structured” water benefits.
It was a cultural moment that included #Emoto, #WaterMemory and homeopathy, and Dr. Gerald Pollack’s ground-breaking and now replicated lab research at UnivofWA.
The unusual properties of liquid water, if compared with other liquids, has puzzled us for centuries because the basic structure of liquid water has remained unclear and has continued to be a matter of serious debate.
Shi & Tanaka, Univ Tokyo
(Imagine that – wouldn’t you think the basic chemical structure of water would be “settled science” by now?It’s only the most importance substance on Earth, after all.)
The pace of the debate, or “convo”, has slowed the last few years, but Pollack’s pivotal Water Conference marches on every year in Bulgaria, undaunted by the fact that the DigiBio paradigm (Benveniste & Montagnier) is still inadmissible in the West, BUT — almost to make things worse — seems to be getting traction in the East.
New scientific studies keep coming forward “problematizing” the old simpler assumptions about the molecular structure of liquid water.
Often such reports seem geared to discredit the insurgent water narrative with it’s holistic implications, many of these institutional studies tend to be based on computer simulations not lab experiments (a problem also found in climate debates).
See Philip Ball’s Water in Biology blog. Ball is the key gatekeeper.
At least this new result is partly empirical, linking some lab data to a few models.
So, pending any expert commentary, it’s not clear off the bat that how this new 2nd configuration of H2O molecules relates to Pollack’s model (“Fourth Phase / Exclusion Zone”) or to the multiple configurations mapped out by Martin Chaplin. (Larger water structures are said to flicker on and off in millisecond speeds.)
Abstract:
“Water is the essential liquid on earth since it not only plays vital roles in living systems but also has a significant impact on our daily life from various industrial applications to earth’s climate system. However, the unusual properties of liquid water, if compared with other liquids, has puzzled us for centuries because the basic structure of liquid water has remained unclear and has continued to be a matter of serious debate. Here, by computer simulations of three popular water models and the analysis of recent scattering experimental data, we show that there are two overlapped peaks hidden in the apparent “first diffraction peak” of the structure factor. One of them (ordinary peak) corresponds to the neighboring O–O distance as in ordinary liquids, and the other (anomalous peak) corresponds to a longer distance. We reveal that this anomalous peak arises from the most extended period of density wave associated with a tetrahedral water structure and is to be identified as the so-called first sharp diffraction peak that is commonly observed in silica and other tetrahedral liquids. In contrast, the ordinary peak arises from the density wave characteristic of local structures lacking tetrahedral symmetry. This finding unambiguously proves the coexistence of two types of local structures in liquid water. Our findings not only provide vital clues to settle a long-standing controversy on the water structure but also allow direct experimental access to the fraction of tetrahedral structures in liquid water.”
Shi & Tanaka, Univ Tokyo
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.9b11211
Related, at New Scientist, H20 water is actually two liquids disguised as one
Electricity, Water, Life and the Cosmos
How Water’s Properties Are Encoded in Its Molecular Structure and Energies
Oh, & the obligatory chart:
