"Quantum Water" Discovered in Carbon Nanotubes - Technology Review: "Many astrobiologists think that water is a key ingredient for life. And not just because life on Earth can't manage without it.
Water has a weird set of properties that other chemicals simply do not share. One famous example is that water expands when it freezes, ensuring that ice floats rather than sinks. That's important because if it didn't, lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom upwards, making it hard for complex life to survive and evolve.
These and other properties are the result of water molecules' ability to form hydrogen bonds with each other and this gives these molecules some very special properties.
Today, George Reiter at the University of Houston and a few buddies put forward evidence that water is stranger than anybody thought. In fact, they go as far as to say that when confined on the nanometre scale, it forms into an entirely new type of quantum water."
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
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