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.'"
Perhaps this might lead to finally finding a cure for http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
Ten points for bringing up quantum mechanics and measuring precision, negative a thousand points for referring to it as a "thingie".
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.
No. The point of quantum mechanics was the quantization, with all those little quanta (discrete particles). Hence the name. The uncertainty principle, moreover, has a numeric quantity behind it which describes exactly how much you can hope to measure in a specific measurement. The physics of hydrophobia/hydrophilia and molecular biology in the aggregate is quite discoverable.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I'm not certain, but I suspect that this is an instance of a relatively new field called "mesoscale physics". This deals with systems on scales between the atomic or single molecule level and the thermodynamic level. Quantum effects are significant, but not as dominant as in atomic (and smaller) physics, but you don't have the advantage of having enough particles to use average statistical behaviour in place of a complete description (ie no thermodynamic limit). It is very very difficult, and it is only recently that we have the tools to begin tackling these sorts of problems. We had one faculty member working on this in my department, but she has recently departed for another university.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
When in search of funding, linking your research to cures for cancer increases your odds of funding approval.
...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!
... the behavior of H2O - C2H5OH solutions. Please expedite. I'm making a run for supplies ASAP.
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe. Check out this explanation:
http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
Indeed, on the quantum scale it's a "thingette" or "nanothing". Physicists are still arguing over the correct nomenclature.
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We could save ourselves some time and just ask the sea creatures at the bottom of the ocean how they do it.
Deep sea creatures do it under pressure.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Polywater was the "cold fusion" of the 1960s. There is a new age fad called structured water too.
And cats.
Quantum mechanics is only in effect when considering things even smaller then atoms.
No, as a fundamental law of physics quantum mechanics is always "in effect" - otherwise it would not be a fundamental law. Classical mechanics is just the approximation of quantum mechanics for incoherent states with very large quantum numbers, but it is still quantum mechanics. Of course it is also possible, perhaps even likely, that Quantum Mechanics itself may turn out to be an approximation of some more fundamental physics but if that is the case we haven't seen any evidence of it yet.....other than our annoying inability to come up with a working quantum theory of gravity.
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
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)
Well, not exactly.
Polywater is supposed to be one of those "unobtaniums", theoretically impossible - but then again, bees have been "proven" not to be able to fly.
People like you make my head hurt.
It's just mind-boggling to me that such an obvious and completely asinine urban legend is STILL being repeated some 70 years after it was first invented. I can understand young children repeating everything they're told ... but judging by your user number, you're probably older than I am. Stop and think before you speak!
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.
No, it doesn't. As Feynman said, if pollywater were possible, we'd have an animal that doesn't eat. It would just drink normal water and excrete polywater, living off of the energy released in the process.
"And a bird, you cannot change". -- Yoda Skynard
"And this bird, change you cannot". -- Yoda Skynnard
Fixed that for you!
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