[Mitch]

WATER has long been a confounding substance to chemists. This most basic stuff of life is denser when liquid than they might have expected and lighter when solid. It behaves sometimes like a lubricant, sometimes like a glue. It expands both when heated and when cooled. And when cooled beyond the liquid-to-solid transition, it can form a number of different forms of ice. This week, that number rose from 16 to 17.

This 17th form, called ice XVI (the confounding factors of water stretch also into ice nomenclature; ice I, the familiar kind, has two variants), is what is known as a clathrate. Discovered either in the late 18th century by Joseph Priestley or in the early 19th by Humphry Davy (for history too is confoundingly water-marked), a clathrate is an arrangement of molecules that surrounds or encapsulates some other molecule. A clathrate hydrate, then, is just such a cage, but made of water.

Read full story at: Ice locket challenge

[Tara144]

You may find also interesting the exclusion zone ordering of water.  Jerry Pollack at U of Washington has done some work on it.  Just an fyi

http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/

[Mitch]

I wouldn't trust the work of Pollack at all. Why are you going down the pseudoscience rabbit hole?

[Tara144]

I wasn't aware there was a problem with his work and he looks legit.  What do you know about it?

I first heard about this exclusion zone stuff in this video lecture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVBEwn6iWOo

I'm definitely open to hearing your thoughts!  thanks

[Mitch]

http://www.chemistry-blog.com/2009/09/03/electroneutrality-is-dead/

[curiouscat]

I wouldn't trust the work of Pollack at all. Why are you going down the pseudoscience rabbit hole?

+1

It's rather sad that Universities allow these guys to fuel pseudo science. I guess tenure give you wide latitude.

[Tara144]

Thanks for your blog entry.  It's too bad there isn't more work being done, dismissing things out of hand or crying "witch!" (homeopathic! - no it isn't btw) isn't science.

Appreciate the response though, really I do. 

I've gone over your blog a few times to make sure and it's clear your spidey-senses are tingling and you don't like the lab work, but you haven't made any scientific argument and also have very clearly misunderstood the paper.  Your reference dismisses the paper out of hand after briefly reading the start of it.  You've also only selected one apparatus and one experiment from a man's life's work and then after feeling suspicious, put the whole thing down. 

IF you have any doubt about your belief, you could start with the 2003 paper about exclusion zones.  Obviously you haven't really done much investigation, so I encourage you to set aside your fears that this is homeopathy or that the lab work is being done subversively and just collect more data for now.

I hope this is helpful or interesting.

[Tara144]

I wouldn't trust the work of Pollack at all. Why are you going down the pseudoscience rabbit hole?

+1

It's rather sad that Universities allow these guys to fuel pseudo science. I guess tenure give you wide latitude.

Right, as opposed to message forums on the internet and blog entries, and moderators.

[Corribus]

I've gone over your blog a few times to make sure and it's clear your spidey-senses are tingling and you don't like the lab work, but you haven't made any scientific argument and also have very clearly misunderstood the paper.

Did you read through the exchange of comments published in Langmuir? I think Corti and Colussi make some very astute criticisms of the article in question, and lay out a cogent argument about the flaws in Ovchinnikova and Pollack's interpretations of their data.

[Tara144]

No public access -- links to a members only site.  Is there another place to read it?