
Things We Still Don’t Know About Water - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/five-things-we-still-dont-know-about-water
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peterwwillis
Repost:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9700471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9700471)

Question: Why do some articles get (2014) etc, but articles from months before
don't get a designator?

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dang
It's just a convention. Monthly resolution seems too high, and putting the
current year on everything too noisy.

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Intermernet
>"Both experiment and calculation seem to indicate that water confined by
solid walls to tiny regions of space, whose size is comparable to that of a
few hundred molecules, begins to exhibit quantum mechanical effects, including
delocalization and quantum coherence."

Sounds like a possible source of random entropy for crypto :-) I did the
Wolfram Alpha query[1] and it turns out that 100 molecules of water has a
volume of 2.992 yL (yoctoliters, 10^-24 L). I didn't think we were up to
yocto-technology yet! The paper that seems to describe this is called
"Evidence of a new quantum state of nano-confined water"[2] so I have a
feeling that "a few hundred molecules" may be a few orders of magnitude out.

From the paper:

"We find that in water confined on scales of 20˚A, this wave function responds
to the details of the confinement, corresponds to a strongly anharmonic local
potential, shows evidence in some cases of coherent delocalization in double
wells, and involves changes in zero point kinetic energy of the protons from
-40 to +120 meV difference from that of bulk water at room temperature. This
behavior appears to be a generic feature of nanoscale confinement."

It's a really interesting paper. (although I had to do a lot of Wikipedia
searches on certain terminology!)

[1]:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+100+molecules...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+100+molecules+of+water)

[2]: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4994](http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4994)

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yread
I don't think yoctoliters necessarily rule out nanoscale, as the Wolfram page
helpfully points out: Edge length of a cube of that volume is 1.4 _nm_

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markbnj
Fascinating. I learn something new every time I read a Nautilus piece.

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yread
Subscribe then! Nautilus Prime is worth it by itself (you get beautiful ebook
and pdf editions of the magazine). Plus you get the printed magazine by mail.
I'm pretty sure it will be interesting reading even 10 years from now.

And you support quality journalism.

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devbug
I was on Nautilus Prime (or the ancestor to that?) and they hadn't renewed my
subscription. Kind of annoying, really.

Noticed it was on sale, so I just picked up a two-year subscription. Suggest
others do the same. Well worth it.

As an aside, I would also be willing to pay a _lot_ more for the quarterly,
like 100-to-200% increase.

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estrabd
I think the comments in TFA have been Time Cubed.

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zkhalique
Richard Feynman said in his interviews that we don't know why water expands
when it freezes. On a physics level, it's still a mystery?

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ldom22
and also according to homeopathy, water has memory and magic healing powers
[http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/](http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/)

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kelvin0
Have you read the article at all? It does not assert any pseudo scientific
novelties ...

