Slashdot Mirror
Thin Water Acts Like a Solid
Roland Piquepaille writes "What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid. "The confined water film behaves like a solid in the vertical direction by forming layers parallel to the confining surface, while maintaining it's liquidity in the horizontal direction where it can flow out," said one of the researchers. "Water is a wonderful lubricant, but it flows too easily for many applications. At the one nanometer scale, water is a viscous fluid and could be a much better lubricant," added another one."
That's for gasses.... The article discusses... water as a liquid, acting as a solid... so no, Pressure (Pa) * Volume (m^3) != # moles * 8.31* T (K) here.
appleguru.org
Of course, PV=nRT is the ideal gas law, but there is a similar relationship for monolayers -(pi)A = nRT - a 2D analog of the ideal gas law for a layer one molecule thick which is often a liquid on another liquid or on a solid. This is when the monolayer is sparse enough that it acts like a gas, even though it may be comprised of molecules which are liquid at that temperature. Pi in the formula is the film pressure and A is the area. This is not really related to the phenomena described in TFA.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
From what I can tell, F@H touched on this a while ago. I was reading the PS3 F@H articles, browsing through the "what good does F@H do?" and the "F@H is just a feel-good project" comments and looking at the results page when I stumbled across the above PDF and thought "Hey, that looks like something slashdot just reported on."