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New 'Tunneling' State of Water Molecules Discovered by Scientists (inhabitat.com)
MikeChino quotes a report from Inhabitat: Scientists just discovered a new state of water molecules that displays some pretty unexpected characteristics. This discovery, made by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), reveals that water molecules "tunnel" in ultra-small hexagonal channels (measuring only 5 angstrom across) of the mineral beryl. Basically, this means the molecules spread out when they are trapped in confined spaces, taking a new shape entirely. The ORNL used neutron scattering and computational modeling to reveal the "tunneling" state of water that breaks the rules of known fundamentals seen in gas, liquid, or solid state. The researchers said the discovery describes the behavior of water molecules present in tightly confined areas such as cell walls, soils, and rocks. The study was published in Physical Review Letters on April 22.
guys, it's time to stop trying. a random guy on the internet doesn't see the usefulness to your discovery, so it's time to pack it in. Unless you're making a new battery, he's not interested.
Oh man, not again!
...Unless you're making a new battery, he's not interested.
new and improved battery you mean...
Neat.
Professor Gerald Pollack at University of Washington has been studying exactly this "new state" of water for over a decade and has written a very good book about it... http://www.amazon.com/Gerald-H...
>> guys, it's time to stop trying. a random guy on the internet doesn't see the usefulness to your discovery, so it's time to pack it in.
<3
is this just a new form of 'square ice' http://www.nature.com/nature/j... , which was also supposed to have interesting flow properties?
“At low temperatures, this tunneling water exhibits quantum motion through the separating potential walls, which is forbidden in the classical world,” said lead author Alexander Kolesnikov of ORNL’s Chemical and Engineering Materials Division. “This means that the oxygen and hydrogen atoms of the water molecule are ‘delocalized’ and therefore simultaneously present in all six symmetrically equivalent positions in the channel at the same time. It’s one of those phenomena that only occur in quantum mechanics and has no parallel in our everyday experience.”
From my simplistic understanding of quantum mechanics, this means the atoms weren't "observing" each other and therefore had probabilistic locations. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
My neighbor has noticed this phenomena ten years ago.
When he was drunk and was peeing in the middle of the parking lot, he noticed that splashes do resemble pattern, as shown in scientific article.
Scientific article also says that water is "...simultaneously present in all six symmetrically equivalent positions". My neighbor noticed he peed all over his shoes and splashes where everywhere.Spot on match description of quantum behavior.
Opportunity to nab a Nobel price lost. Again.
Where is some kind of useful application for this? Anything? I'm listening.
I know I'm responding to a troll with this but: this is as far as I'm aware the first instance we've had even a hint of a way to make a channel which conducts whole atoms tunneling around in a circle while traveling along it (pretty much like a wire conducts electrons for electricity.) Will it be of use? Most likely there will at least be a niche device or two to come out of it, most interesting things at least have that. The really interesting thing will be to see what happens when you make it into a long tube and pump water through it, or into a coil shape and see what happens when you pump water through it. It might have microfluidic uses, it might have uses stemming from so much tunneling of things larger than electrons (which alone gave us the transistor for the computer you're using now.) It might be nothing other than an oddity people muse at. That's science, we poke things until they do things then figure out how to apply those things to do other things.
PLEASE: Don't click the click-bait article.
It is completely ignorant and wrong-headed in most every way imaginable.
Other Commenters have noted the decade+ work of others on this.
Let us go further back in time. Every object has a wavelength (and a limit on precise knowledge of its velocity). It also has a limitation on the precision with which one can determine its location. Yes, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Everything is a cloud of probability with regards to its exact position. Quantum Mechanics does not disappear in the continuum regime. The reality is that such effects are drowned out by other signals, or are imperceptible at the macro (or even micro) scale.
Oh, FFS, just use Wikipedia and look up "wave-particle duality".
Thomson did it with the electron. Einstein did it with the photon. I did it with the phonon. And apparently, per Comments above, Gerald Pollack did it with water – a HUGE hadron-mass (molecule of three atoms).
Ignore the click-bait article.
Gotta get dem grants, am I right? Where is some kind of useful application for this? Anything? I'm listening. Too bad "science" nowadays means writing pieces of science fiction for some big wig who'll throw money at you instead of you know, actually inventing something useful or innovating. Actual innovation is now punished with lawsuits and copyright infringement notices.
Agreed.
This is precisely the reason that I am getting out of "science" completely.
I have grown tired of being an intellectual leader, only to suffer intellectual rape at every turn.
As that Eisenstein Guy said, "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing that I know."
Fellow Holographer?
Palladium has long been noted to be capable of absorbing large amounts of hydrogen:
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Yeah exactly! E=mc^2, where's the practical use for that? Theoretical foundations, who needs that?
Seriously though, what's wrong with people nowadays? Without research into things that _don't_ have readily apparent uses there's no progress. I mean come on why did Ampere and his friends play with frog legs? No practical use whatsoever. Who needs this "electricity thing". Nothing practical.
This discovery will inevitably be garbled and abused by pseudo-science charlatans to promote highly profitable bullshit like homeopathy.
I can see it now:
Most science grants are approved by scientists, not some big wigs who can't tell the difference between science and fiction. And most of the remaining projects are granted money based on pork, regardless of the non-scientists' view of pie in the sky ideas.
As long as it's not ice-9.
In the early 1990's I read a couple of books by Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. In these books Penrose speculated about something called Ordered Water, present in the microtubules of the cytoskeleton of neurons in the brain - possibly forming some kind of Bose-Einstein Condensate. Is this a similar kind of thing?
Here we come: http://www.urbandictionary.com... bloody scientists messing about with nature. No good will ever come of it I tell you.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
does this mean we do not need dark matter anymore ?
It must be really painful to be you, to know how shitty you are.
Ice-nine
For once they are in the news not for having lost their harddrives on trains, benches or just lying around in hallways.
I've known this ever since I was little and would get a glass of ice water, within a few minutes the outside of the glass was wet.
I later learned the real reason.
I remember darkly 2 to 3 decades ago teams at some university difracting some small amine molecules in a rudbidyum crystal. Similar problem & effects.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This sounds suspiciously like the claims for "PolyWater", a magical form of water that I first saw mention of in Popular Science magazine in the early 1970s.
It turned out to be the result of impurities in the water.
Yeah exactly! E=mc^2, where's the practical use for that?
Many people aren't aware that getting GPS working properly requires relativity.
It disproves Thermodynamic predictions, again.
Isn't it a bit odd that such an abundant and important substance as water has no equation of state? And it just got weirder. Thermodynamic laws predict simplicity and smooth entropy gain but that fails even for water.
Thermodynamics is dead. Give it up. Find another way to be mean to poors.
You missed the point of my Comment entirely.