Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water

This sounds like the type of thing that could be used for some future technology that doesn’t exist yet and I can’t comprehend. Some sort of process that takes advantage of being in this second critical state.

This is not usually how technology progression works when you see it play out.

More likely, it would be something like a 2% more efficient refrigerator. These advances stack up for a hundred years and build into something that looks like magical future technology.

There were very very few exceptions to this in history.

(To be clear, I don't think that will actually happen, but it would be hilarious if it did!)

Saying that “less diluted works better” is saying the diametric opposite of what Homeopathic “theory” does!

Rightly or wrongly, homeopathic products are considered medicines, not supplements, and people in general are very mindful of spending money on medicines that don't work.

[Citation needed].

People spend enormous amounts of money on junk "cures" and have done for centuries. Homeopathy is just one of the many current such scams.

This could be why Homeopathy can compete with allopathy because both the versions are "junk", so "junk" sold by someone who has more time to talk with the patients win..

Anyhow, it's not the angle of discussion that I was going for. Your assertion that homeopathy as a whole is a scam is rooted in a tiring misconception that all of its products are too dilute to work which is a falsity. Numerous homoeopathic products absolutely have a sufficient amount of the product to result in a biological effect.

Just what the hell are you arguing? They're not condiments or decorations or supplements or foods. Medicine is the word we use for drugs that are intended to address an active medical concern whether they work or not.

Also for the record, standard pharma medicines often try to pass off seriously toxic ingredients in their products, e.g. benzalkonium chloride, which is a quarternary ammonium compound, a notable tissue irritant causing significant tissue injury, such as to the nose and throat. The FDA doesn't care about you; they exist to protect the vendors.

Of course, there are also a number of cases where western “supplements” were caught containing actual prescription medicine, not just natural precursors or such. Same idea…

My comment was strictly in the context of ingredients and isolated labeled products that are used only in the homeopathic space.

Let:

A = amount of ethanol

V = initial whiskey volume

W = added water

Initial concentration: c₁ = A / V

After dilution: c₂ = A / (V + W)

If you drink the entire diluted glass: ethanol consumed = c₂(V + W) = A

Intoxication ∝ ethanol consumed

Therefore: drunkenness ∝ A not ∝ (V + W)

Adding water changes concentration, not the total ethanol: A = constant ⇒ drunkenness = constant (ignoring effects of drinking rate).

Homeopathy was invented after the discovery of germ theory [1][2]. So not really. And homeopathy has always suffered from an adulteration problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy

Homeopathy was created in 1796, and we still haven’t gotten rid of it.

Meanwhile 65 years later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_controversy_and_c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_David_Palmer

At the same, adjusting your back isn't going to cure your cancer, no matter what idiots with fake degrees say.

The challenge is that the latter is just as stupid as homeopathy, but whereas homeopathy really has no redeeming qualities beyond the placebo effect, at least chiropractic practices actually do sometimes have groundings in reality.

On the upside, "the risk of bioaccumulation of metals/metalloid from the homeopathic medicines seems to be rather low, due to small quantities of those products prescribed to be applied per day, as well as insignificant metal contamination of the majority of tested products" [1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20674842/

Physical manipulation can work, but the most useful techniques are in widespread use such as dealing with a dislocated shoulder. Which leaves chiropractic practices with almost nothing that’s both unique and particularly useful.

No it’s not a problem. When the founder claims he got the information from a ghost of a doctor 50 years ago, the whole thing is bullshit from the ground up. It’s pseudoscience.

Chiropractic “medicine” isn’t just claiming that they can make your joints feel better, the claim that it can cure cancer is at the core of it. It’s no better than a massage, but wants to claim the title of “medicine” or “doctor” for its practitioners when that’s as far from the truth as homeopathic “medicine”.

Germ Theory was only finally accepted (after initially being rejected) due to the advent of evidence-based medicine, which homeopathy popularized.

Source?

A lot of doctors are shoving people out the door based on their first thought inside a short appointment as they type up a prescription.

Homeopathy is ineffective kookery, but our medical system has some well known gaps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater

But what are the incentives of those who did those tests? That should be said in the same breath as you say "empirical testing/evidence".

Here is an insightful comment [1] in this thread but it is "dead" now, thanks to the down votes of true believers of "science". Any study that goes against the narrative despite any of the merits, would suffer the same fate as this comment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48728644

This implies to me that the counter-evidence is strong and complete enough to discourage 'investment' into such a pursuit.

But there is many order of magnitude more money invested in preventing the publication of something like that..

All the "reputed" journals who gets funded by pharma would not touch such a study, despite any merits it have. This is so apparent to anyone who is not completely oblivious of how the world work that no one in their right mind will even attempt to fund such a study...

(this is not a serious reply, my apologies. I get that entrenched views are very difficult to change, hence the phrase "Science advances one funeral at a time", and funding sources are bias-generating - refer oil companies and climate change. Having said that, isn't any human that drinks any water taking part in homeopathy? I mean, dehydrated folks are likely to be less healthy than hydrated folks, but I think that's a case of correlation doesn't imply causation)

It is really funny when people claim that Trump just want his friends to make money.

Will someone explain to me how all Trumps friends are making money from pseudo science and not from the biggest and ever growing pharma business, that he appoints someone like RFK in that position.

Despite the "consensus" thoroughly "debunking" it conclusively many times...

Also, if it ever happens, I think it would be during course of many decades that all the existing "scientists" can save their faces, and new generations won't care about "Science" being wrong once again, despite all the projections of "certainity" back then..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U&t=353s

The entirety of this song is a listen worth your time. Doubly so if you've never heard of Nick Minchin before.

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

Avoid commenting with tangents that have nothing to do with the article. If you don't agree, the site moderator dang can explain to you with administrative action.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But density at "greatest" would mean volume shrinking...right?

I don't understand the article's logic.

Then, suddenly, at 32F/0C, water's real miracle happens. All the loose molecules click into place with other molecules - well, nearly all, because ice cubes aren't monocrystalline, typically, but those spare unmatched ends of molecules at crystal interfaces are still trapped by their other ends, and any single molecule unable to "find" a match for either strongly attractive end will still be trapped as well into solid-matrix mechanics. At most, those solo unmatched molecules become slight diffaction points for phonons (sound-energy propagation), but they are in fact so rare and so slight that they are generally undetectable. (The crystal faces are made of millions of unmatched molecule ends, and have therefore much more effect.)

Other polar molecules can act similarly, but water is astoundingly smaller than most others - so its molecules "find" their matches more easily, as they don't need to "rotate" much mass to line up - and is much less flexible as a result (so the alignment on the two-molecule level forms a more rigid body than, say, a polar sugar, and the volumetric effect is more pronounced).

Dissecting the hydrogen bond network of water: Charge transfer and nuclear quantum effects[2024]

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads4369

Resonance Character of Hydrogen-bonding Interactions in Water and Other H-bonded Species[2005]

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16581375/

So it's just a numerical simulation with some ML techniques?

Similar how you can find human faces in random pixels or rocks.

Very interesting point though!

If I understand the article correctly, they found a phase transition reaction, a chemical reaction that occurs in liquid water below 0 C that splits the body of liquid water into one continuous region of high density and one of low, so its no longer a uniform liquid.

This would also release heat, like the freezing reaction (and unlike random rearrangements of molecules in the liquid).

Also its unclear whether during the phase transition there really is two seperate macroscopic regions as opposed to a mixture (maybe like a suspension)

I'm confused about this.

I had assumed that those were steam bubbles, not air bubbles. At high enough temperatures water becomes a gas. In a boiling pot, the highest temperatures are at the bottom. Temperature fluctuations on the bottom would lead to more steam production in some areas than others.

Any point at the bottom of the pot that did form a steam bubble would immediately lose energy to the steam and cool down. Now we likely are thinking of metal pots in this exercise, and metal conducts heat very well, so that cooled down point in the metal would draw nearby heat from the pan towards it, decreasing the chances of bubbles nearby. This would presumably lead to bubbles forming at some reasonable distance from each other, as any bubble formation causes the nearby pot metal to cool down.

Once in steam form, the steam bubble has a harder time losing energy. The energy was gained through direct contact of water with metal, but steam is much less dense, and it seems like the high-density shell of water around the steam bubble would act more like a mirror - reflecting the kinetic energy back into the bubble. This would keep the bubble stable as it travels up.

That's been my mental model of it for a while. It would be cool if someone who studied this stuff for real opined on it though.

One of the biggest challenges with water is modeling proton transport (i.e. pH, as water is a weird self-ionizing material.) Protons move too fast for MD steps to be stable, so they have to be approximated in some way. That is one reason why there are so many water models to choose from. Each model has a trade-off that is fine in some contexts, disastrous in others.

My money is on a TIP4 artifact.