Deuterium-free Parafresh or Orthofresh
Which expensive bottled water of the future will you prefer?
Meet the real spin doctors: Scientists tell H2O to chill out so they can separate isomers
Boffins have, for the first time, managed to separate water into its two isomeric forms to test how they react to stuff, according to a paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday. You may or may not know that each water molecule exists in one of two slightly different structures: para-water and ortho-water. Both have …
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 19:08 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: Deuterium-free Parafresh or Orthofresh
Real men drink Para-water. 25% more reactive? Hard as nails and gives ya tannin a right tanning. It'll probably dissolve a Yorkie too! Orthofresh sounds like something a bird watcher would drink.
But I digress. At least water quality would be verifiable, and expensive to produce. Which may not bother the peddlers of other reassuringly filtered tap waters.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 22:06 GMT no_handle_yet
Re: Deuterium-free Parafresh or Orthofresh
There is still work to be done here before we can say for sure which one is best for your chakra. To start drinking either of these without knowing which has the most vibrations could be almost as dangerous as allowing your crystal to run out of quantums. Hopefully professor Paltrow has a team on this as we speak.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 08:13 GMT Paul Kinsler
only holds true at the very low temperatures ...
(a) "spin", as applied to subatomic particles, or atoms, isn't the same as mechanical rotation (because that is called angular momentum).
(b) the nuclear spins referred to may not be strongly coupled to the atomic motions of the molecules that (in aggregate) make up the temperature.
It /might/ be that the temperature of the water has an effect on the nuclear spins of its constituent atoms on some relevant timescale, but it isn't necessarily so.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 08:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: only holds true at the very low temperatures ...
Apparently the spin is transferred relatively easily between molecules, and at any particular temperature there will be an equilibrium state between the different types of water. To keep a water molecule in a particular ortho or para state, you need to stop it interacting with other water molecules, which is what they did in this experiment.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 10:12 GMT ibmalone
Re: only holds true at the very low temperatures ...
I don't think these are true isomers in the chemistry sense either, it usually implies a different configuration of atoms. These are actually going to be different quantum states but with the same configuration. Interesting they may have different reactivity though.
Nuclear spin in water tends to reach equilibrium quite easily, NMR and MRI rely on this. In a magnetic field you have spin up and spin down states and they can only be kept out of equilibrium for short periods of time, the excess energy is lost or absorbed through interactions with surrounding nuclei over a couple of seconds at 3 tesla. Without an external field the only source of energy difference is the interaction between the spin states of the two nuclei, which is much smaller and therefore any inequality can decay much faster.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 12:53 GMT ibmalone
Re: only holds true at the very low temperatures ...
(a) "spin", as applied to subatomic particles, or atoms, isn't the same as mechanical rotation (because that is called angular momentum).
(b) the nuclear spins referred to may not be strongly coupled to the atomic motions of the molecules that (in aggregate) make up the temperature.
It /might/ be that the temperature of the water has an effect on the nuclear spins of its constituent atoms on some relevant timescale, but it isn't necessarily so.
While "rotate" is the wrong word the spins can be affected by the magnetic fields of nearby nuclei (i.e. in adjacent molecules), or even the overall motion of the water molecule itself as it moves or spins in local fields.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 07:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Seems obvious, but since you asked ...
"[...] but you have to be a badge holder. "
Thanks for the pointer.
Most of the tags reserved for badge holders would be helpful to everyone reading A/C comments that require formatting.
I use A/C because I want each post to be judged on its own merits - not prejudged because I have said something agreeable or disagreeable to others in previous posts.
It is interesting that it says < strike > was
dropped in HTML5.-
Wednesday 30th May 2018 07:54 GMT jake
Re: Seems obvious, but since you asked ...
Again it seems obvious, however ... posting as AC doesn't make your posts stand alone on their own merit. Rather, it lumps them into the vast sea of AC posts, many of which are useless drivel. In some threads, change that "many" to "most". As a direct result, I'll usually pass up reading an AC post when I spot a name I recognize on the following post. I suspect I'm not alone.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 09:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Seems obvious, but since you asked ...
"Rather, it lumps them into the vast sea of AC posts, many of which are useless drivel."
It is my impression that A/C posts are generally as meaningful as named ones. For some names I have to exercise special consideration to avoid ignoring/accepting their points out of pre-judgemental bias.
Anonymity in a public space was expected in my career to avoid any reflection on my company or customers. The same still holds true for some of my references. It is safer to always do A/C for all posts. Like TOR - my possible linked identity is swamped in the sea of other anonymous users.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 10:23 GMT ibmalone
They have different energy levels, at thermal equilibrium the probability of each state is proportional to e^(-E/kT) (k being Boltzmann's constant, k_{B}), you can work out the imbalance by doing (p1 - p2)/(p1 + p2) (or p1/(etc..), p2/(etc..), depending what you want to know) and will find it depends on the temperature and the energy difference. If the difference is much less than kT then it'll be 50:50, much greater then the lowest energy state will be more more prevalent, roughly the same puts you in an interesting transition area. The trick to an experiment like this is stopping the things interacting so thermal equilibrium doesn't come into play.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 07:01 GMT Milton
That photo ...
... of the oriental lady crossing a city bridge with water in the background: it was chosen automatically by software because of the keyword "water", correct?
And those awful puns (mostly thankfully missing from this article): for a while now I've been thinking that no self-respecting human could come up with such crap, and now it's clear—they are autogenerated by an AI (Artificial Idiot) as well, aren't they?
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 09:03 GMT frank ly
This!
This could explain how water is able to form a persistent memory of previously added substances even after many repeated dilutions. The arrangement and distribution of para-water and otho-water moleculues represents a binary memory store of previous 'experiences'. At last, a scientific explanation for homeopathy!
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 13:04 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Re: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
And anyway, the correct way of looking at homeopathy is using quantummechanics, as I showed in my paper in Annals of Improbable Research years ago: It might work, as long as you don't look (pdf pre-print here)
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 12:25 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
The Vital Spark
"A zap of up to 15kV across the deflector created an electric field that separated the molecules into para- and ortho-water."
Para Handy, that
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 13:02 GMT Rich 11
Re: Just putin an idea out
Since you'd need to keep the water molecules cold enough to maintain isomeric purity then, yes, feeding someone several trillion trillion water molecules could indeed kill them. But then so would holding their head down in a puddle, so on the whole I don't think Vlad's favourite sons of Russia are likely to adopt this method.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 16:10 GMT vincent himpe
soon at a wholefoods near you
Parawater and orthowater.
let the discussions begin about which one is healthier.
My bet is on the electrolytially distilled counterclockwise spinning alkaline orthowater.
or is it raw parawater ? i can't keep them apart ...
has anyone tried this with deuterium yet ?
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 21:28 GMT jake
Re: soon at a wholefoods near you
But Ortho sells inorganic chemicals![0] There will never be an Ortho-anything at Whole Foods.
Funny but true: One of the Whole Foods I shop at occasionally doesn't sell gluten. Something about all the gluten intolerant people who shop there being offended. So I told them I was vegan[1] and I needed the gluten to make satan[2], and to increase the protein content of my bread[3], and asked "doesn't Whole Foods cater to vegans?" ... I thought the store manager's head was going to explode. I always wondered what color puce was, now I know.
[0] Note that I'm fully in favo(u)r of better living through chemistry, and almost always have several Ortho products about the place.
[1] A little white lie in the name of scientific experimentation. So shoot me.
[2] Yes, I know the alternative spelling.
[3] True, actually. 1 Tbs (8g) gluten to 2 cups (250g) AP flour produces a fair approximation of so-called "bread flour" at a much lower price.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 21:32 GMT JassMan
One possible use
would be anywhere that you need de-ionised water such as power stations. These use extremely pure water to prevent early boiling through nucleation which is important if you are trying to produce superheated steam. The problem with super pure water is that it eats your boiler tubes (which is why it is called hungry water). If you could remove the para-water cost effectively, this could reduce the maintenance costs of steam circuits.
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Wednesday 30th May 2018 21:57 GMT Kernel
Re: One possible use
"The problem with super pure water is that it eats your boiler tubes (which is why it is called hungry water)."
I'm not claiming to be an expert, but I seem to remember reading that drinking too much distilled water will do much the same to your bones - something to do with dissolved calcium in body fluids being at equilibrium with that in bone.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
