{"id":6924,"date":"2019-09-06T12:30:17","date_gmt":"2019-09-06T07:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=6924"},"modified":"2019-09-10T12:39:13","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T07:39:13","slug":"water-has-more-than-one-type-of-molecule-and-thats-even-stranger-than-we-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=6924","title":{"rendered":"Water Has More Than One Type of Molecule, And That’s Even Stranger Than We Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not that you could tell by looking at it, but the glass of water sitting on your desk contains two different kinds of water molecule rotating in subtly different ways.<\/em><\/p>\n

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A recent experiment managed to separate them, discovering one is much better at reacting than the other. We don’t expect this ‘better’ water to become a market hit, but the method behind the discovery is a boon for quantum chemistry. Chemists from the University of Basel in Switzerland took a mix of good old dihydrogen monoxide particles and used electrostatic fields to sort them according to their total nuclear spin.<\/p>\n

Spin is a quantum property\u00a0of particles describing an angled direction they’re free to move in. Different types of particle are categorised according to the value of this property.<\/p>\n

In one version of water referred to as an ortho-isomer, the combined spin of the particles making up its atomic nuclei add up to a value of 1.<\/p>\n

But there is another type, called a para-isomer of water.\u00a0Its nuclear spin totals 0, which according to some fundamental principles governing the movements of atoms in molecules means they should rotate differently to those in its cousin.<\/p>\n

For the most part these spins don’t change, meaning each molecule keeps its identity as a para- or ortho-isomer.<\/p>\n

The question is: do their theoretical differences in rotation make any noticeable difference in how the two different water molecules react with other substances?<\/p>\n

To find out, the researchers packed a super chilled crystal made of calcium ions with ions of\u00a0diazenylium\u00a0(N2H+).<\/p>\n

They then shot streams of ortho- and para-water molecules into the heart of the crystal, where they reacted with the diazenylium.<\/p>\n

Counting how many of the N2H+ ions were left in the crystal after a certain period gave the researchers a good idea of which isomer did a better job at reacting.<\/p>\n

On tallying the results, they found the way para-water’s atoms twisted and turned meant the isomer did a 23 percent better job at reacting than boring old ortho-water.\u00a0Analysing the figures through a computer simulation confirmed the difference, showing not all water molecules behave in the same way.<\/p>\n

No doubt there’ll be some company out there ready to pounce on the discovery to make a mint selling it as a superior form of bottled water, adding just one more scam\u00a0to the bottled water industry.<\/p>\n

For most of us, water is water. Chugging down a glass of para-water likely won’t make any difference to your health.<\/p>\n

But to chemists,\u00a0water is just plain weird, and learning more about its reactivity could make a significant difference to how we study its properties.<\/p>\n

It might just be two hydrogens and an oxygen, but under various conditions it behaves in a multitude of unusual ways,\u00a0forming strange states of matter\u00a0that we’re only just beginning to understand.<\/p>\n

Since life is currently defined as complex, water-soluble chemistry, knowing how materials dissolve and react with water molecules is vital to our detailed understanding of biology and its origins.<\/p>\n

Water-weirdness aside, the experiment’s results also demonstrate our growing ability to model and test the effects different quantum properties have on entire molecules.<\/p>\n

“The better one can control the states of the molecules involved in a chemical reaction, the better the underlying mechanisms and dynamics of a reaction can be investigated and understood,” says the\u00a0study’s senior author, chemist Stefan Willitsch\u00a0from the University of Basel.<\/p>\n

Only recently\u00a0a record was set\u00a0for the world’s most precise chemical reaction \u2013 the brief joining of a single atom of sodium with an atom of caesium.<\/p>\n

Understanding the quantum properties of molecules in order to manipulate their reactivity on such a fine level is truly the new frontier of chemistry.<\/p>\n

This research was published in\u00a0Nature Communications.<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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