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'Floating Bridge' Property of Water Found
eldavojohn writes "When exposed to high voltage, water does some interesting things. From the article, 'water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity. Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another, usually from the anode beaker to the cathode beaker. The cylindrical water bridge, with a diameter of 1-3 mm, could remain intact when the beakers were pulled apart at a distance of up to 25 mm.'"
Now we can build 25mm bridges to nowhere!! fp?
Like a bridge *entirely *composed *of troubled water...?
and it makes me wonder.. where they talk about the changes in water density.
IF you could find a way to change the density of water within living cells-- decrease slowly, and increase rapidly...
by oh say, 10% or more from standard...
When you decrease slowly, then cellular walls could expand to accomodate the increased volume without bursting...
now your return the density to normal (if necassary).. and before the cells recover- you freeze the cells-- and the expansion of the frozen water does not cause massive gross cellular damage.
now cyronics is much more achievable.. (of course, the voltages described do not seem condusive to application to living flesh,, but perhaps another method could be found for the same effect...)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
So raise your hand if you think that was a Russian water-tentacle.
Actually the problem with freezing isn't the expansion, the cells could stretch enough to allow that. The problem is the ice crystals that tend to slice up the cells like a million tiny rasor blades. A further problem is cracking of the ice while it's going from freezing down to liquid nitrogen temperature.
Given that helium is a monatomic gas, nonpolar, and far less dense than water, I would have to say... no.
Oh, and then there's the fact that we already understand superfluid helium pretty damn well.
I predict we'll be seeing homeopathic "medicine" made out of this magick water within a few weeks.
We know your tricks, Jesus. You were generating large amounts of voltage through each of your legs. It's only a matter of time before we figure the other ones out!
What does empty space mean here?
Was the experiment done in a vacuum, open air, or in space?
...so you don't have to cope with skeptical people.
- What you said that is?
- A water bridge.
- That's bullshit.
- It's true. The water is floating between the beakers.
- Oh, really? Then I guess it's okay for me to touch to confirm it, right?
- I don't recommend that.
- I knew it. You're so full of shit.
- Okay, touch it if you want. But I wouldn't do that.
- *laughs* Yeah, I'll just touch this "water bridge" and we can't move on with our... AAHHH!!!
- *increases voltage gradually* That's for calling me a liar. Asshole.
Human cells have membranes, not walls. Only plants and bacteria have walls.
Ah, damn... I'm going to have to shoot my TV again.
And to make things worse :-) it can be formed in a large number of types of ice, not only one type. Which type depends on the pressure involved. (I don't have the exact figure about how many types of ice that exists, but I think it's at least eight.) Some types of ice has a higher density than the liquid form of water while other as we are familiar with has a lower which results in the fact that ice floats. If ice hadn't been able to float life as we know it wouldn't have formed, or at least the oceans would be a lot different since the bottom would be covered in ice.
Depending on the temperature and pressure water can change state from solid to gas or vice versa without going to the liquid phase. There is also at least one point at which the properties that separates the gas form and the liquid form ceases to have a meaning and a fourth state is entered. If I remember it correctly it appears at a temperature of about 340 degrees C. (I may be wrong)
And even if we don't think about it as such water is actually one of the best solvents around. More often we think about some petrol or alcohol when we are saying solvent, but water is also our friend here. The reason why water and oil doesn't mix is because water is a polar molecule with a positive and a negative side while the molecules oil is built on are electrically neutral. An intermediate here are alcohols (a few of them drinkable, but most of them not - or only once) where one end of the molecule is electrically neutral and friend with oil while the other is polarized and water-friendly. This means that alcohols can be used when you want to mix water and oil. In some cases it is possible to create an emulsion of water and oil too, and one of the most common is mayonnaise (which most people has been in contact with).
Sometimes the term heavy water is making it's way through the news. It is actually ordinary water - chemically speaking - which means that there is no problem if you should drink it - except that it's rather expensive. The difference is that one or both of the hydrogen atoms in the molecule has an extra neutron or two. These forms are called deuterium or tritium. The extra neutron involved means that the atoms can be fused with each other to create helium. It is possible to fuse plain hydrogen atoms too, but the amount of energy needed is much larger and not precisely what can be done in a normal lab.
At least two cases has been in movies or TV series that I know of that refers to heavy water and special properties (neither of them plausible) and the first was a humor series involving English POW:s in a German camp where they were trying to seed the idea of the wonder properties of heavy water when it comes to hair growth to a bald German. The second was that it could be used to cure cancer. (don't believe either)
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
{couldn't resist...}
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I have a vague memory that in one episode of MacGyver, the hero did something like this to redirect water from the corrupt landowner's property to nearby drought-stricken peasant's fields. He used a car battery initially to get the voltage required to create the water bridge. But when the car battery started to die, he used the water to drive a small generator (made from an empty Wite-Out bottle, some fuse wire and scuba diver flippers) that produced the electricity to keep the water bridge going. It was a great episode, even if the perpetual-motion machine was a bit far fetched.
Timbers? Girders? I don't think there's a load-bearing wall to be found here...
What's holding up yours?
Good one. Very Insightfull.
... get ready star trek fans... PLAZMA...
The point at which water and steam are the same is a line, actulally of pressure, that goes down to its 'Triple' point. Where without a change in potential, H2O can exist in all three phases. If you increase its pressure/temprature way up, like you say to 340^o C, then all the electrons cannot attach themselves to the molicules, and the electrical properties are lost, and the gas enters the fouth state of matter called
Seems that some gases when exposed to electrical current, at room tempretures, when they strip their electrons off, give off diffrent wavelengths of light... so if you can arrainge them in a matrix, you have a Plazma TV/Display.
Uhh.. There is a problem with Heavy water. Really bad to drink... Particularly hard-hit by heavy water are the delicate assemblies of mitotic spindle formation necessary for cell division in eukaryotes. Regular tap water gives off neutrons too, but not in any sufficent quantity to be dangerous. Almost undetectible from the backround radiation. A molocule of heavy water is about 1 in 41 Million. so to get a gallon of heavy water, you need to process at least 4 times that amount.
Think 10 days of clean mississippi flow.
(And you did guess right about the number of types of ice. Of course there is a S.F. Book called Ice-9, but its fictional)
If you take water, as steam, and swril it around a cylinder, the heaver molocules will move to the sides, where you can siphon them off. Turns out that 90cm are about right for this. SO when a county like Iraq starts ordering up a storm of 90cm alumium tubes...
BUT, inorder to get enough water to seperate out the heavy molocules, you need an enoumus water source. In Germany, they used alpine rivers as the water source. In Iraq, you would need an extrodinarly large amount of fresh water to putify out the heavy water, and by the time the Tigrus and Euprhaties rivers reach Bagdad... the water is sufficently polluted to make it unusable for heavy water production. Now, if you had a place with heavy rainfall, little air pollution, like North Korea, you can make lots of heavy water, and of course sell it to the Iraqis.
It realy doesnt take much to figure this stuff out.
Why, an endless stack of turtles, of course...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
If one considers that burning is a chemical change on the molecular level then what we are seeing might actually be burning.
A high voltage condition puts a lot of excess energy in the water now consider that the water molecules are being forced to break their bonds and decomposing into their component parts being hydrogen and oxygen, since they are not in contact with say Carbon in any great quantity they don't burn in what we would understand as fire. The electricity would pull off one of the atoms either a oxygen or a hydrogen atom leaving a unbalanced pair with enough of a charge to attract a stray atom of which there are suddenly a lot. So the upshot it they can only reform back into H2O and since the current is going in one direction the momentum of the breaking forms the bridge. The other way would be if forming weak molecules of H4C2 which can't hold together and break down again also along the lines of the current. Since the current is originating from one direction its natural that they are breaking along the direction of the current the motion is consistently between the two poles.
Ok, I am now officially out of crack, see you guy again once I have scored.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I'm thinking of a bartenderless bar, controlled by some OS.
And I'm talking about alcohol diluted enough that its not going to become a Flaming Moe.
This reminds me of a story about Queen Victoria (of Britain.) Someone was showing her around a factory where they were producing wire for electrical street lighting, and she asked:
"How do you drill the hole in the wire for the electricity to go through?"
While this revealed that she didn't understand how electricity works, it was rather a good question.
How does this relate to the matter at hand? Well, we need to come up with some good questions to help us work out how this water bridge thing works.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
I find it scary that someone actually found that informative.