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Five things we still don’t know about water

nautil.us

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Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#51

Post by mensetmanusman »

anitil wrote: post #46
dluan wrote: post #27

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 bacter…

Because 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

I like how framing a hypothesis against the norm was framed as a conspiracy. Ha.

Now we know that there were GoF research proposals by the same scientists squashing these ‘conspiracies’. Wups conflict of interest.

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#52

Post by Eszik »

anitil wrote: post #46
dluan wrote: post #27

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 bacter…

Because 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

I think GP was referring to Montagnier's support of the water memory theory (a fraudulent theory made up to support homeopathy), rather than his comments on covid 19.

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#53

Post by selcuka »

Eszik wrote: post #52
anitil wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 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

I think GP was referring to Montagnier's support of the water memory theory (a fraudulent theory made up to support homeopathy), rather than his comments on covid 19.

Exactly [1]:

> In January 2009, Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Laureate virologist who led the team that discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), claimed (in a paper published in a journal that he set up, which seems to have avoided conventional peer review as it was accepted three days after submission) that the DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses massively diluted in water emit radio waves that he can detect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory#Other_scientists

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#54

Post by beecafe »

nawgz wrote: post #50
sp332 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a chemical change. Neither is ice forming from water.

Yes, clearly ice water is a state change and not chemical, but my point is mostly that prions / protein folding is neither a state-change nor a chemical change, so I don't see how it's relevant to the posited scenario.

A prion causing other proteins to misfold can only occur if the misfolded state has lower energy than the correctly folded one. It does this by acting as a catalyst, lowering the potential energy barrier that was allowing the protein to persist in the correctly folded state, to the point where e.g thermal fluctuations allow it to cross that barrier. The equivalent could occur if there was a lower energy state for water (and an ice-9 like scenario could then occur if this lower energy state catalyzed further transitions to this lower energy state). We don't expect this to be possible though, as we can't make water decay by other ways of making it cross that hypothetical potential energy barrier by dumping energy into it (whereas for a protein you can e.g burn it, denature it, etc), and aren't aware of catalytic activity by any forms of water.

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#55

Post by ars »

amelius wrote: post #35

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.

Interestingly 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.

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#57

Post by chaps »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #32
feoren wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

One 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.

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#58

Post by nawgz »

beecafe wrote: post #54
nawgz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, clearly ice water is a state change and not chemical, but my point is mostly that prions / protein folding is neither a state-change nor a chemical change, so I don't see how it's relevant to the posited scenario.

A prion causing other proteins to misfold can only occur if the misfolded state has lower energy than the correctly folded one. It does this by acting as a catalyst, lowering the potential energy barrier that was allowing the protein to persist in the correctly folded state, to the point where e.g thermal fluctuations allow it to cross that barrier. The equivalent could occur if there was a lower energy state for wat…

Thanks for the comment. Thinking out loud, for prions is not the requirement that they "[act] as a catalyst, lowering the potential energy barrier ... to the point where e.g thermal fluctuations allow it to cross that barrier" also a guarantee against this type of ice-9 "infection" scenario, because the equilibrium of the environment itself would be so impacted and be absorbing that energy and then causing unfavorable conditions to the reaction at the reaction's frontier even? I more-or-less equate that to the "supercooled water + normal ice" reaction of how much energy delta you can create allows you to make a small energy explosion reaction/state-change/etc that isn't truly an "infection" but just a localized energy transfer.

But okay, after stating this very interesting mechanism in that form, I see the point being made by others. This catalyst-style mechanism which can induce physical changes in the environment without itself changing could be exploited on scales that would allow one to "maliciously/adversarially" create a chemical / energized substance that would catalyze say a lake or an ocean into freezing / sublimating.

However, I find it impossible to see how such a transition could be found for water though, and it seems to me the nature of the prion & proteins is that the prion requires some level of complexity in the matter it interacts with to cause this energy transition. For more exotic substances than water, or perhaps water which itself holds a large amount of solutes satisfying some characteristic, I could see it.

I appreciate your insight into this matter clarifying the prion mechanism especially. I am also not well educated on these matters so hopefully it doesn't stink too bad :)

Re: Five things we still don’t know about water

#59

Post by 29athrowaway »

What 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.

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