How water gets its exceptional properties July 5, 2016 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Icebergs float because water has its highest density at four degrees Celsius – actually quite unusual. Credit: Michael Haferkamp Water is liquid at room temperature – astounding for such a small molecule. Insights into the causes are provided by a new simulation method, which has its origins in brain research. Using artificial neural networks, researchers in Bochum and Vienna have examined the atomic interactions of water molecules. Based on their findings, they explain the melting temperature of ice and the density maximum at four degrees Celsius – based solely on computer simulations. The newly developed method is just as precise as quantum mechanical calculations, but is 100.000 times faster. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-exceptional-properties.html#jCp Explore further:'Liquid-liquid' phase transition: Researchers identify transformation in low-temperature water More information: Tobias Morawietz, Andreas Singraber, Christoph Dellago, Jörg Behler: How van der Waals interactions determine the unique properties of water, in: PNAS, 2016 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1602375113
We wouldn't be here if water didn't react that way. The oceans would be frozen if ice didn't float. There are a lot of interesting elements however (not that water is an element). Gadolinium is magnetic (attracted by a magnet) at temperatures above freezing but below body temperature. So you can pick up a piece with a magnet but when it warms up to 70 degrees or so it will fall off (no longer magnetic). Bismuth instead of being attracted to a magnet repels the magnet (diamagnetic). Gallium is a solid below 85 degrees for so and becomes a liquid after that (in your hand). Many things have exception properties.
I had filed away some research on the structure of a water droplet which was most interesting. It showed a molecular line up at the surface and other features that showed more than one would expect from the humble water droplet. I lost the file and sadly remember insufficient to talk with authority but what did seem possible, to me, was that the humble water droplet may have provided the first issolated environment which would have been necessary for life, or the first egg. I try but I cant recall where or who the research can be attributed. Thanks for your post as always very interesting and informative. Real research, real people and real science. I would like to thank the legitimate posters each time I read something but I avoid being repetative but you may take it I really appreciate those who take the time to contribute worthwhile material. Alex
I have read research on the notion that water droplets, generated in breaking waves and carried aloft by winds, would have contained the chemicals of the proverbial primordial soup. Partial evaporation from the droplet would have concentrated the chemicals and provided an opportunity for interesting reactions to take place, before being returned to the aforementioned soup. (Or something like that.) Unfortunately, I also do not recall where I read this. I'll have a look through my HD and see if I kept a copy.
That is interesting because I thought something along those lines. My memory is not reliable, well it is not bad but law is similar to science in that one tends not to state something on the one hand unless you can reach the authority with the other... But I recall the molecules lined up and other "foreign" molecules pushed to the center. I think they have a negative charge such that droplets repel each other which adds to the quality of seperation. If calcium were in the droplet (and with no more than a HUNCH ) it may be opportunity for combination with CO 2 to get to the very first shell to my imagined egg. What makes the idea appealing is one of the problems of from test tube to life is how to create and maintain a seperate environment. A mist fits the bill. Anyways "they" will work out that I am right.. The fact I thought it up is pretty good authority. I have been looking but can not find the research I mentioned but hey there is so much out there on water droplets. Thanks for your post. Alex
But WHAT have these people actually discovered about water? This is not even mentioned in the article. There is a tantalising phrase, saying that van der Waal's forces are "decisive", in some unspecified way, for "the geometry and flexibility" of hydrogen bonds. But there is sod-all explanation of what interaction between H bonds and van der Waal's forces they think they have uncovered. It may bear repeating that there is no mystery at all about why water has the properties it has. H bonds account for both its liquid state and the expansion from 4C through to freezing and this has been known over half a century. The exact nature of the H bond itself has remained controversial for much longer (electrostatic vs. covalent contributions and so on) , but that does not seem to be what this is about. It seems to be a case of "Phys Org strikes again": a gosh-wow article that is all mouth and no trousers and merely frustrates the inquisitive reader.
This is slightly different from what I was referring to. You appear to be thinking of vesicles forming from lipids and creating a cell like wall. There is a lot of material on that. I suggest a Google search along the line of vesicle lipid abiogenesis might yield results. I would do that through Google Scholar. exchemist. My understanding of the behaviour of water close to freezing was related to the increasing formation and structuring of water polymers bound by hydrogen bonds. Is that understanding faulty?
No, though I'm not sure I would choose the word "polymer" to describe the structure. Ice is a hydrogen-bonded 3D "giant structure" rather than what we would usually call a polymer. But certainly what seems to happen is that groups of molecules start to become "locked" into a short-range order that resembles the ice structure. This structure occupies more space than liquid water, because that way it is able to release more energy by shortening the hydrogen bonds than it would by merely shortening the overall intermolecular distance. And that is so because the attraction due to hydrogen bonds is stronger than that due to van der Waals' attraction, which is what would otherwise determine the process of settling down into the solid state. For other readers (you will know this), one can look at it the other way round and think about melting. The strength of the hydrogen bonding accounts for why the Latent Heat of Fusion is so great, compared to other common substances: one has to give the molecules a lot of energy before they can break the H bonds and start rotating and moving around as they do in a liquid.
Thank you. Yes, my choice of polymer was probably based upon my own way of absorbing what I had read. Your description pretty well matches what I had been thinking.
