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Thin Water Acts Like a Solid

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the mash-downs dept.

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."

9 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Nanoscale lubricant? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, based on poor results getting it on in a swimmin pool, I can verify that water is a lousy lubricant at normal scale!

    1. Re:Nanoscale lubricant? by Pesh+Hawksfire · · Score: 5, Funny

      Rule 24 of the internet: Pics or it didn't happen.

  2. Not only thin... by gillbates · · Score: 5, Funny

    But cold water also acts like a solid at times.

    --
    The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
    1. Re:Not only thin... by wsherman · · Score: 5, Funny

      But cold water also acts like a solid at times.
      Unless you're trying to walk on it - then it acts like a banana.
    2. Re:Not only thin... by Some_Llama · · Score: 5, Funny

      But cold water also acts like a solid at times.

      Unless you're trying to walk on it - then it acts like a banana.
      And when you're trying to stick your tongue to it, then it acts like an adhesive.
  3. We already know this... by kansei · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...it's called prison lube.

  4. Folding@Home did research with this by cdogbert · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  5. Re:But what is the channel made of? by snoop.daub · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is a hydrophilic channel. In a hydrophobic channel, the vapor phase is more stable than the liquid, so you get "cavitation" or "dewetting", as you approach the walls of the channel closer and closer, at some point all the water gets pushed out of the channel and the walls get pushed together.

    The phenomenon is well understood in the hydrophobic case, both experimentally and in simulations. This experiment is new, up till now they couldn't get down to such small separations, but they are overstating the case when they claim that this is a complete surprise... as another poster said, many many simulation studies have suggested a structuring of water near hydrophilic surfaces.

    Another neat thing happens when you have one wall hydrophobic and one wall hydrophilic. This has been dubbed a "Janus interface" after the two-faced Roman god, and there's a lot of interest in them.

  6. Re:What happens when you learn by Deadstick · · Score: 5, Funny
    Why is its the only non apostrophized possessive?

    I think he has hi's possessives right.

    rj