Something new to learn about water, my my…
An excerpt.
Water molecules spark big dispute
Stanford, Berkeley scientists battle
By Charlie Emrich -- Bee Staff Writer Published 12:01 am PDT Saturday, August 12, 2006
For more than a century, Cal and Stanford have been locked in a cross-Bay rivalry over everything from science to their annual football game.
The newest point of contention is the very stuff that separates the two Bay Area schools -- water.
Two years ago, Stanford chemist Anders Nilsson published a high-profile study showing that the way molecules in water are connected is startlingly different from what scientists had believed.
If Nilsson is right, it would alter the way scientists think about the "universal solvent." That, in turn, would have an impact on everything from how new drugs are designed to studies on how life itself works.
"This has shaken the whole water community," he said.
But since Nilsson's study was published, University of California, Berkeley, water researchers have been firing back from across the Bay with studies claiming Nilsson's ideas are bunk....
What's got scientists in a froth is what they call the "structure" of liquid water -- that is, how individual water molecules arrange themselves, and more specifically, how many connections each one forms with other water molecules.
These connections, or bonds, Nilsson said, "are what gives water all its properties."
To understand the structure of liquid water, it helps to remember the chemical formula for water, H2O: two small hydrogen atoms stuck to one large atom of oxygen, looking a little bit like the silhouette of Mickey Mouse's head with the hydrogens as the ears.
In ice, each water molecule makes four bonds to its neighbors, and in its liquid form, water was thought to make the same four bonds. By shining X-rays on water and observing how those X-rays were absorbed, Nilsson and his Stanford team saw that bonding in liquid water didn't look like bonding in ice. Half the bonds they saw were broken, meaning that liquid water made only two bonds, not the four bonds everyone believed to be there.
