Slashdot Mirror
Tracking Water Molecules Could Unlock Secrets
ScienceDaily is reporting that several new discoveries about the simple molecule of water have kicked off a surge in research that scientists believe could lead to solving some of the world's most tricky problems from agriculture to cancer. "Understanding how individual water molecules maneuver in a system to form fleeting tetrahedral structures and how changing physical conditions such as temperatures and pressures affect the amount of disorder each imparts on that system may help scientists understand why certain substances, like drugs used in chemotherapy, are soluble in water and why some are not. It could also help understand how this changing network of bonds and ordering of local tetrahedrality between water molecules changes the nature of protein folding and degradation. 'Understanding hydrophobicity, and how different conditions change it, is probably one of the most fundamental components in understanding how proteins fold in water and how different biomolecules remain stable in it,' says Kumar. 'And if we understand this, we will not only have a new way of thinking about physics and biology but also a new way to approach health and disease.'"
Wasn't the whole point of the whole quantum mechanics thingie that you cannot measure things this precise?
So is he saying if we better understand why some things disolve in water (and particular interest, water in our blood stream) and why some don't we will better handle diseases?
Or they could unlock the secret of creating Ice 9.
We are all doomed!
And freeze all the worlds oceans. Kurt Vonnegut could not be reached for comment, because he is dead.
Perhaps this might lead to finally finding a cure for http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
I'm sure someone will say it more seriously than you are, so let me just point out right away, the structures that the scientists are describing are fleeting, lasting for billionths of a second before breaking down and reforming with different water molecules. In short, even if the structure of these bonds could effect the body (and that's a big if), you'd have to deliver the water to the problem area within a billionth of a second for it to do anything.
When in search of funding, linking your research to cures for cancer increases your odds of funding approval.
Has anyone mentioned ice-9 yet?
That could solve a few problems.
Wasn't the whole point of the whole quantum mechanics thingie that you cannot measure things this precise?
No Fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it.
- Prof Farnsworth, Futurama
We could save ourselves some time and just ask the sea creatures at the bottom of the ocean how they do it.
...could lead to solving some of the world's most tricky problems from agriculture to cancer.
Please please PR people, come with something more original next time. The solving cancer thing is so old, nobody believes that anymore. And I never knew agriculture was a problem.
-- Cheers!
Since biological processes (and I mean all of them from the molecule level to the baby-making level) depend on temperature, it is obvious that knowing how water works at this molecular level can in fact solve many variability in medicine.
If you think about it... our body maintains itself at a constant temperature as much as possible... there's a reason for that... for the biological processes within the body to react efficiently.
This can lead to different types of medicines that are most effective at certain temperatures.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
... the behavior of H2O - C2H5OH solutions. Please expedite. I'm making a run for supplies ASAP.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Understanding hydrophobicity, and how different conditions change it, is probably one of the most fundamental components in understanding how proteins fold in water and how different biomolecules remain stable in it," says Kumar.
When asked by a reporter, Kumar said the idea came to him while hitting the bong.
Maybe. Check out this explanation:
http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
We need more grant money or we'll have to get real jobs.
Polywater was the "cold fusion" of the 1960s. There is a new age fad called structured water too.
What I find interesting is that this opens up at least the possibility of that old sci-fi standby (really old - I haven't seen a reference to it in modern sci-fi) of polywater.
Polywater is supposed to be one of those "unobtaniums", theoretically impossible - but then again, bees have been "proven" not to be able to fly.
Simple as it might seem, water is one of the most complex fluids, because of the long range order created by hydrogen bonds.
Hear hear.
Back in the '60s when I was taking chemistry there was much talk about how @$^%ing complex the behavior of water was, how major breakthroughs were needed to really understand it, how it affected so many other things in chemistry, how you have to understand not just the individual molecules but the interactions of many of them with each other and other molecules, yadda yadda. Expectation was that really understanding water would occur late in the reduction of chemistry to something that could be (near-)fully modeled and predicted.
Then supercomputers came along and we started to get good solutions for a lot of stuff. Complex mechanical loading. Nuclear and subatomic physics. The utterly anti-intuitive science of aerodynamics. Brute-force correct solutions to video synthesis replacing cute tricks that dripped with artifacts. Weather prediction (pushing out near the newly-understood chaos limit of the input measurements). Then they were surpassed by more powerful supercomputers formed of networks of machines for parallelizable tasks. Even digital cryptanalysis and protein folding began to be tractable.
But it is only now, as cheap supercomputing capability is in the hands of individuals (in the forms of graphic processing units that became cheap commodities due to their utility for computer gaming), that we're starting to see breakthroughs in understanding the behavior of water.
Sounds like it's right on track.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Understanding complex issue X can increase our ability to cure cancer and HIV, thereby making X-research eligible for the ocean of cancer-related research funding. /Mister Cynical
The claim is that understanding THIS is a significant component of understanding the behavior of the molecular machinery of which cells, cancers, and anything that can affect them are composed.
If that's correct, making it eligible for such funding may be appropriate.
Sometimes self-interest and truth point in the same direction.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
To use this research for water and wastewater treatment, the basis for civilization. For instance, chlorine is used to disinfect water but is not 100% effective. Chlorine leaves behind disinfection by-products which are a common cause of taste and odor problems in municipal water supplies. The EPA says there must be a chlorine residual of 5mg/L at the farthest point in the distribution system. Chlorine combines with many organic molecules to form carcinogens, (chloramines). Chlorine is not needed after it leaves the distribution system. There really needs to be an effective and economical alternative! If chlorine is used to kill organisms then why are we drinking it? Also, there are many organisms that survive the treatment process whether they are immune to chlorine or not. These organisms form colonies in the distribution system and feed off of each others wastes and have to be removed by stuffing a foam bullet down a supply line. Then there's also the issue of sediments contaminating your water from the iron and copper pipes which distribute it. Also, look at the corrosion of your hot water pipes. This is because the lime used to treat water falls out of suspension at warmer temperatures, but is still suspended in the cold water you drink. Wastewater treatment is a tricky business that we largely depend on microbes to do the dirty work. This process has to be closely monitored since what is in the wastewater is never constant unless you are treating industrial wastewater. A good portion of industrial, medical and food processing outfits are fined for the wastes they produce, but only pass that cost on to the consumer. Hopefully one day there will be a method effectively and economically discriminate contaminants at any point of discharge, whether wastewater or at the tap. Until then, waste the first 30 seconds of water from your tap or at least until the chlorine smell goes away.
Seriously, how did this get on the front page? I suppose it's an interesting article, to theoretical chemists, but that's about it. Here's the paper from PNAS (heh).
You may notice a few things if you read it. First, it's an MD (molecular dynamics) simulation. Read: classical equations of motion with an empirically-derived force field (just to head off the quantum gibberish). Second, you'll notice that the paper doesn't mention anything about agriculture or cancer (or much in between), but instead seems to focus on topics as vital to our way of life as orientational entropy and the Widom temperature of water. Third, if you read the last few paragraphs (if you can make it that far), you'll see that a referee brought to the authors' attention that the work presented in their paper had essentially already been done about 15 years ago. Fourth, and perhaps most telling, is that this study is published in PNAS. This journal has an interesting quirk in that if you're a member of the Academy, you get to choose who referees your paper. Trust me, I've seen first-hand how some ancient Academy members use this policy to publish some serious garbage in that journal.
Now I'm not saying that Kumar et al's paper is not an important contribution to the field of theoretical water chemistry. I am, however, saying that it's not nearly interesting enough to be on the front page of Slashdot. Not sure why ScienceDaily picked it up either. I keep telling myself that when I have time, I'm going to start a lit review blog in this field so that the general (geeky) public has a little better handle on the stuff going on in physical chemistry that's actually interesting. Well see if it ever happens.
The idea here is that if you understand the nitty-gritty details of how hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions work you could improve how we understand protein folding. Protein folding is an area of biochemistry with no really good models, because it's so complicated. I'm not sure these structures will do much to help us understand protein folding, but if they did it would increase biomedical understanding by a huge amount, as well as opening up possibilities in biocatalysis.
In short, even though the structures may not affect our bodies, the underlying principles affect our proteins' shape, which affects EVERYTHING in our bodies. (a mediocre analogy would be that counting doesn't affect our ability to use rockets, but understanding numbers/math makes a huge impact on our ability to make rockets)
I'm sure someone will say it more seriously than you are, so let me just point out right away, the structures that the scientists are describing are fleeting, lasting for billionths of a second before breaking down and reforming with different water molecules. In short, even if the structure of these bonds could effect the body (and that's a big if), you'd have to deliver the water to the problem area within a billionth of a second for it to do anything.
Yeah, but aren't we dealing with a pseudo-science that claims that solutions in the parts-per-trillion range (or less) are effective in treating everything from hair loss to athlete's foot? Once you've made that jump of logic, saying it happens in 10e-9 seconds is no big leap.
The funniest (and saddest) commentary on homeopathic "medicine" is on the box itself. I've seen several overpriced cure-alls that tout the fact that they are safe for children because they have "no side effects". Of *course* they have no side effects. They don't have any front, back, top, or bottom effects, either!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
every water molecule fleetingly interacts with its four nearest neighbors, forming a tetrahedron
So that's why I haven't cured cancer yet- I didn't realized the tetrahedrons in water need to have five points!
Don't Panic.
I wish I could, but no matter how long I wait, it's always the present.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Why they must deeply desire to understand what water does, right? Unless of course they know their 'science' is bogus.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
So what you're saying is that if it's not porn that drives technology, it's video gaming?
I'm not so sure about that. Protein folding is mostly a computational problem. Simplifying the computation is what will be needed to improve those models. Maybe this will help, but I'm not sure. It sounds like it might actually make the computation more complicated, which definitely won't help.
I struggled through the article (I'm not a physicist although I studied lots of Physics 35 years ago), and realized I was able to understand it because I twice struggled through reading R. Buckminster Fuller's, "Synergetics" Vols I and II. His key point on systems practically begins with a tetrahedron http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s04/p0100.html#402.00 , but his description of close-packing atoms and molecules is pretty vivid.
(Anyone trying to visit the site above: Do not be discouraged. It is full of totally interesting concepts and well-worth the effort. It helps to have a reading method such as described in Mortimer Adler's, "How to read a Book", http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/0671212095 which is also worth the effort.)
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
"...to improving chemotherapy drugs whose side effects arise from their solubility or insolubility in water."
This is absolutely not true. The side effect is inherent to the molecular structure of the molecule, not its solubility or lack thereof. (If it's insoluble it doesn't get into the body, and hence doesn't have a side effect... but then it has no effect at all.)
I don't disagree that we know little about protein folding. I'm just not so sure the findings in this paper help much. We can already model water as bulk solvent with varying properties--sometimes just a dielectric, other times with complex hydrodynamic properties. In the end, though, protein folding is a computational problem. We need better algorithms and/or models with fewer computational steps if we are going to further our understanding. Models that increase the number of computational steps (like this one) won't help much.
It may help us to understand other properties of water, though, such as the solubilities of non-ionic organic compounds and azeotropic effects of certain organic solvents.
This article on Homeopathy was posted last week, who was checking submissions?
Ahh if only more people knew of this little black-and-white gem of a movie...
Posting obviously for anonymous reasons.