The man with the golden nose

The history of science is full of strange characters, but surely one of the most peculiar was Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.  Born in 1546 in Knutstorp, Sweden (then owned by Denmark), he came from a long line of wealthy and noble landowners.  Best known for his contributions to observational astronomy, his pinpoint-accurate measurements of the positions of stars and planets firmly convinced him of the correctness of the Copernican heliocentric model -- and were what allowed his contemporary Johannes Kepler to devise his three laws of planetary motion.  (Themselves instrumental in allowing Isaac Newton to develop his own three laws of motion, and more importantly, the Universal Law of Gravitation, a century later.)

He used his wealth and influence to good purpose.  He built the observatory of Uraniborg, the best of its kind at the time, on the island of Ven not far from Copenhagen.  His mapping of stellar and planetary positions, all done painstakingly by hand, had a staggering average precision of one arcminute.  Because his work was so careful, it gave Kepler no room to hang on to his precious "everything in the heavens moves in perfect circles" notion, and forced him to acknowledge that orbiting objects travel in ellipses -- a great example of the quip by Thomas Henry Huxley that "the great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."  Brahe's reputation as a careful observer was unimpeachable.

He was also, however, a very odd man.  At age twenty, he was at the engagement party of a friend and quarreled with his cousin Manderup Parsberg over (I shit you not) who was the better mathematician.  The only way for two mathematicians to settle such a quarrel was, of course, a duel in the dark with swords, and Brahe got the end of his nose cut off.  After receiving medical care, he had a local goldsmith fashion a golden nose for him that he attached to his face with glue -- he apparently also had silver and brass ones for everyday use, reserving the gold one for special occasions.  (He and Parsberg evidently made it up afterward, and remained friends.  I don't know if they ever settled who was the better mathematician, but my money is on Brahe, given that hardly anyone knows who Parsberg is anymore.)

Tycho Brahe by Eduard Ender [Image is in the Public Domain]

He owned a tame elk, that he kept in the castle with him -- until one day it drank too much beer, fell down the stairs, and died.  He had the odd combination of loving luxury and simultaneously disdaining it; I guess if you're ridiculously wealthy, you can afford to be contemptuous of money.  Offered a lucrative position at the court of the Danish king, Frederick II, he turned it down, telling a friend, "I did not want to take possession of any of the castles our benevolent king so graciously offered me. I am displeased with society here, customary forms and the whole rubbish."  Critics of his scientific publications were met with stinging rebuttals, and given his skill as an astronomer, Brahe was usually proven right.  However, his abrasive personality finally caught up with him -- when Frederick died in 1588, he was succeeded by his son Christian IV, who didn't like Brahe and ultimately forced him into exile.

Brahe's death was as peculiar as his life.  In October of 1601, the story goes, he was at a banquet in Prague and had to pee, but thought it was rude to excuse himself even for something that quick.  When he returned home, he found he couldn't pee, and died in horrible agony eleven days later.  The blame was laid on his stubbornness at refusing to leave the banquet, but the truth is, that can't be responsible for his death.  You can't injure yourself by holding it -- ultimately your sphincter just refuses to cooperate and you wet your pants.  It's almost certain that Brahe had a physiological problem like a urethral blockage or prostate hypertrophy, and that's what ultimately caused his demise.

But there's no doubt that the bizarre story of his death adds to his already notorious reputation for being peculiar.

The reason Brahe comes up -- besides his just being an interesting person -- is that there's a new analysis of the stuff left behind in his alchemical laboratory at Uraniborg.  He had a less-well-known fascination with alchemy, and ran a laboratory in the basement that conjures up images of the mad scientist, with a dungeon lab with stone walls and floors and various liquids bubbling and fuming in glass retorts.  When Brahe fell out of favor, and (especially) after his death, Uraniborg was pretty well taken apart, but there were bits and pieces left behind -- in particular, some glass shards from his alchemy equipment that still contained residues of the materials they'd last held.

A new analysis of the shards at the University of Southern Denmark has found significant traces of nickel, copper, zinc, tin, antimony, tungsten, gold, mercury, and lead.  Some of them, such as gold, lead, and mercury, are unsurprising; those were stock raw materials for the alchemists' eternal dream of turning base metals into gold.  Others, though, are more puzzling.

"[T]ungsten is very mysterious," said Kaare Lund Rasmussen, co-author of the study.  "Tungsten had not even been described at that time, so what should we infer from its presence on a shard from Tycho Brahe's alchemy workshop?"

In fact, it wouldn't be isolated for almost two centuries, when chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was able to extract it in pure form, something he was also the first to do with molybdenum and barium.  But it's possible that Brahe accidentally stumbled upon a method for extracting it -- or, perhaps, that it simply remained behind as an impurity in some other mixture he was concocting.

So Brahe was an odd amalgam in another way -- a dedicated and exacting empirical astronomer, and a subscriber to one of the weirdest discredited models humans have ever come up with.  "It may seem strange that Tycho Brahe was involved in both astronomy and alchemy, but when one understands his worldview, it makes sense," said Poul Grinder-Hansen, who also co-authored the study.  "He believed that there were obvious connections between the heavenly bodies, earthly substances, and the body's organs.  Thus, the Sun, gold, and the heart were connected, and the same applied to the Moon, silver, and the brain; Jupiter, tin, and the liver; Venus, copper, and the kidneys; Saturn, lead, and the spleen; Mars, iron, and the gallbladder; and Mercury, mercury, and the lungs.  Minerals and gemstones could also be linked to this system, so emeralds, for example, belonged to Mercury."

Once again illustrating that the scientific method only works where you choose to apply it.

In any case, the recent study shines more light on the life and work of one of the strangest scientists who ever lived -- Tycho Brahe, the man with the golden nose, whose work so profoundly inspired such greats as Kepler and Newton.  That he was also involved in alchemy may seem weird, but you can't be right all the time.  And given his reputation for oddity, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that he continues to confound our expectations, over four centuries after his death.

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Arts and sciences

Behind every art is science.

Of course, you can produce beautiful art without knowing any scientific details; the Renaissance masters created gorgeous paintings without knowing the exact chemical composition of their paints.  It's amazing, really, that they accomplished what they did, combining their astonishing talents and aesthetic senses with materials developed using what amounted to trial-and-error.

I wouldn't consider myself an artist, but I do play around with clay, and I've gotten the chance to geek out over the scientific side of pottery -- specifically, glaze chemistry.  Glazes are generally made of four ingredients -- a glass-former (usually some form of silica), a flux (which lowers the melting temperature of the mix and make it flow), a refractory material (to give it stability and viscosity), and a colorant.  One of the first things I learned when I started making pottery, though, is not to assume the final product after firing to 1200 C will be the same color as the raw glaze; in fact, the reverse is usually true.  Here's a kiln load, coated with various raw glazes, before firing:

And the same kiln load after firing:

The changes that occur during firing always strike me as something very like alchemy.  Even knowing a bit about how they work -- and what I know is, honestly, little more than a bit -- there's still an unpredictability about glazes that make them fun, exciting, and occasionally exasperating to work with.

I was reminded of my trials and tribulations -- and occasional triumphs -- with glaze chemistry as I was reading a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - Nexus a couple of days ago.  Called "Marangoni Spreading on Liquid Substrates in New Media Art," and written by San To Chan and Eliot Fried of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, this paper looks at the creation of intricate and beautiful fractal patterns using little more than acrylic ink and paint, water, and rubbing alcohol.

The technique involves applying tiny droplets of thinned acrylic ink onto a painted surface.  The irregularities in the surface draw the liquid away from the point where it is applied, and the design develops as you watch, creating branching patterns resembling snowflakes, neurons, or lightning.  Just as with ceramic glazes, the exact mix of the various ingredients can drastically change the results.  The process works because acrylic paints and inks are thixotropic, meaning that their viscosity changes when they're stirred or shaken (a common thixotropic substance is ketchup -- which is why you have to shake it or it won't pour).  The water and alcohol change the viscosity, and in combining the ingredients there's a sweet spot where the mixture is viscous enough to hold together into threads on the painted surface but not so viscous that it doesn't move.

"In dendritic painting, the droplets made of ink and alcohol experience various forces," said San To Chan, who co-authored the study.  "One of them is surface tension -- the force that makes rain droplets spherical in shape, and allows leaves to float on the surface of a pond.  In particular, as alcohol evaporates faster than water, it alters the surface tension of the droplet.  Fluid molecules tend to be pulled towards the droplet rim, which has higher surface tension compared to its centre.  This is called the Marangoni effect and is the same phenomenon responsible for the formation of wine tears -- the droplets or streaks of wine that form on the inside of a wine glass after swirling or tilting."

"We also showed that the physics behind this dendritic painting technique is similar to how liquid travels in a porous medium, such as soil," said Eliot Fried, the study's other co-author.  "If you were to look at the mix of acrylic paint under the microscope, you would see a network of microscopic structures made of polymer molecules and pigments.  The ink droplet tends to find its way through this underlying network, traveling through paths of least resistance, that leads to the dendritic pattern."

I love knowing the science behind the arts (although I must admit that the mathematics in the paper about dendritic art lost me pretty quickly).  It was great fun, for example, that the fiddler in the band I was in for ten years was a physics professor at Cornell University and taught a class called The Physics of Music -- she more than once told me things about how my instrument worked that I honestly hadn't known (such as why flutes go sharp when they warm up).  

I don't know about you, but knowing the science of how things work enhances my appreciation for their beauty.  I've loved Bach's music ever since I first heard it as a teenager; but now, understanding how fugues and canons are constructed makes my wonderment over pieces like the astonishing A Musical Offering that much more profound.  Likewise, my knowing a little about glaze chemistry enhances my enjoyment of the beauty of the results.

Science itself is beautiful.  And when you combine it with art and music, you have something truly magical.

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The dynamic Earth

The highlight of my trip to Iceland this past August was seeing the newly-erupting volcano of Fagradalsfjall, southwest of the capital city of Reykjavík.

Fagradalsfjall is Icelandic for "mountain of the beautiful valley."  I'm not sure I'd use the word "beautiful," which to me carries connotations of "benevolent."  When we were there, you could feel the eruption before you heard or saw it; the entire floor of the valley was vibrating, a subsonic rumble that I felt in my gut.  Then you hear the roar, a guttural, low-pitched thunderous booming.  Then you smell it -- the characteristic sulfurous, rotten-egg smell of an active volcano.  Then you crest the top of a low hill, and see it for the first time.

We were close enough that we could feel the warmth radiated from the lava.  Much closer, and the combination of the heat and the sulfur gases would have been overwhelming.  Orange-hot plumes of molten rock exploded out of the fissure and splattered onto the sides of the cinder cone, almost instantly turning to shattered, jagged chunks of black basalt as it cooled and hardened.

It was one of the most spectacular things I've ever witnessed.  In the presence of this kind of power, you truly feel tiny and very, very fragile. 

We were really extraordinarily lucky to see what we did; we were there on the 15th of August, and -- for reasons unknown -- the eruption abruptly ceased on the 21st.  Fagradalsfjall is still very much an active volcano, though.  Just last week it started up again, and this cycle looks like it may actually be even more dramatic.

What brings all this up is a paper last week in Nature about some research out of the University of California - Santa Barbara that analyzed the lava from Fagradalsfjall and found that it ran counter to the conventional model of how volcanoes erupt.  The previous understanding was that magma chambers fill gradually, and undergo mixing from convection and the physical shaking from earthquakes; then, when the eruption happens, the chamber drains.  This would result in a relatively uniform chemistry of the rock produced from the beginning of the eruption to the end.

That's not what geologists saw with Fagradalsfjall.

"This is what we see at Mount Kilauea, in Hawaii," said Matthew Jackson, who co-authored the study.  "You'll have eruptions that go on for years, and there will be minor changes over time.  But in Iceland, there was more than a factor of 1,000 higher rates of change for key chemical indicators.  In a month, the Fagradalsfjall eruption showed more compositional variability than the Kilauea eruptions showed in decades.  The total range of chemical compositions that were sampled at this eruption over the course of the first month span the entire range that has ever erupted in southwest Iceland in the last 10,000 years."

Why this happened is uncertain.  It could be that Fagradalsfjall is being fed by blobs of liquid magma rising from much deeper in the mantle, where the chemistry is different; those much hotter blobs then rose to the surface without a lot of mixing, resulting in a dramatic alteration of the rock being produced over the course of the eruption.  This adds a significant complication to interpreting records of past eruptions, not only in Iceland, but with other volcanoes.

"So when I go out to sample an old lava flow, or when I read or write papers in the future," Jackson said, "it'll always be on my mind: This might not be the complete story of the eruption."

It's fascinating that as far as science has come, we still have a lot to work out -- not only out in the far depths of space (as yesterday's post about MoND described) but right beneath our feet on our own home world.  As eminent astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson put it, "You can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.  This is very different from the way journalists portray us.  So many articles begin, "Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board."  It’s as though we’re sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks—masters of the universe—and suddenly say, "Oops, somebody discovered something!"  No.  We’re always at the drawing board.  If you’re not at the drawing board, you’re not making discoveries."

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The stellar forges

I remember when I first ran into the rather mind-blowing concept that the familiar elements we have here on Earth -- oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silicon, and so on -- hadn't always existed.

The discovery that one element can transmute into another and that elements (under the right circumstances) can be created -- the dream of the ancient alchemists -- ran completely contrary to the prior understanding that atoms are unchanging.  (In fact, even the name atom comes from the Greek ἄτομος, meaning "cannot be cut.")

But when Henri Becquerel and the Curies discovered radioactivity, and realized that there were naturally occurring elements that could change into different ones, it overturned the model of atoms and elements being eternal.  This, of course, opened up the question of where they'd come from originally, a question that only became more important to answer when it was discovered that the universe was 73% hydrogen and 25% helium -- the remaining 2% accounts for everything else.

The answer is that most of the elements are synthesized in the cores of stars, which act as stellar forges to produce every element on the table with the exception of hydrogen.  Carl Sagan's famous statement that we are made of starstuff is nothing less than the unvarnished truth.  (One of the most poignant statements he made in his series Cosmos was, "Our ancestors worshiped the stars, and they were far from foolish.  We are right to revere the Sun and the stars -- for we are their children.")

Since the first discovery that elements can be created and destroyed, we've come to understand pretty well what the origin of each is.  Here's a fascinating twist on the periodic table, showing the origin of each of the elements:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cmglee, Nucleosynthesis periodic table, CC BY-SA 3.0]

We're inextricably linked to the rest of the universe by our common chemistry.

Not only are the atomic building blocks the same, but we're finding that the molecules they form are remarkably consistent everywhere we look.  The fundamental constituents of organic matter, for example, seem to be abundant in the cosmos.  That surmise got a huge boost with a paper last week in the Astrophysical Journal that describes research into the constituents of dust clouds forming around massive young stars -- dust clouds that eventually will coalesce to form planets.  In those clouds, the researchers found the spectral fingerprints of massive quantities of water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen cyanide, carbon disulfide, and acetylene -- some of the raw materials that given an energy source will spontaneously generate such pivotal molecules as amino acids, simple sugars, and the purine and pyrimidine bases of DNA and RNA.

"We’re seeing many more molecular signatures than were ever seen before at these wavelengths,” said Andrew Barr, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate at Leiden University, in a press release from NASA.  "It turns out that these stars are like chemical factories churning out molecules important for life as we know it and we just needed the right kind of observations to see them."

My son and I were just talking about how mind-bogglingly huge the universe is -- the latest estimate is that there are one billion trillion stars in the observable universe (that's 1 followed by 21 zeroes).  If even a tiny fraction of those have life, that is still an enormous amount of cosmic biodiversity.  And it seems like every time we look at one of the variables in the famous Drake equation, the attempt by astronomer Frank Drake to break down the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe by looking at the probability of each of the necessary steps to produce it, we have to revise our estimates upward.  Exoplanet systems are apparently the rule, not the exception.  Organic chemistry, as last week's paper showed, is kind of ubiquitous out there.  We've known since the Miller-Urey experiment about the easy self-assembly of complex biological molecules given raw materials and an energy source.

It looks like we're getting closer and closer to the message of another quote by Carl Sagan, this one from his brilliant novel Contact: "If we're the only ones in the universe, it seems like an awful waste of space."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Deep life, oxygen, and false positives

In the last couple of days we connoisseurs of all things extraterrestrial received some good news and some bad news.

Let's start with the bad news first.

One of the ways astronomers have suggested we might detect life on other planets is the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, which could be detected spectroscopically.  Oxygen is highly reactive -- it is, unsurprisingly, a strong oxidizer -- meaning that it will tend to react chemically with whatever's around and get bound up into a compound of some sort.  Therefore, the logic went, if there's oxygen in the atmosphere, something must be releasing it faster than it's being removed by ordinary chemical reactions.

Ergo, a living thing (probably doing some variation on photosynthesis).

A piece of research published this week in Earth and Space Chemistry called, "Gas Phase Chemistry of Cool Exoplanet Atmospheres: Insight from Laboratory Simulations," written by a team of scientists from seven different research institutions, came to a startling conclusion -- that atmospheric oxygen might not be a signature of life but a result of photochemistry (chemical reactions triggered by sunlight).

What the researchers did was to expose various mixtures of gases thought to be common components of exoplanet atmospheres to a variety of temperatures (from 25 C to 370 C) and light intensities and spectra, and they found that in many conditions, the energy from the heat and light was sufficient to break down oxidized gases (such as carbon dioxide) and release molecular oxygen.

"People used to suggest that oxygen and organics being present together indicates life, but we produced them abiotically in multiple simulations," said Chao He of Johns Hopkins University's department of Earth and Planetary Science.  "This suggests that even the co-presence of commonly accepted biosignatures could be a false positive for life."

Now, this doesn't mean that if oxygen is found in an exoplanet's atmosphere, it is a false positive; it's just that the He et al. research shows that the finding would not be the slam-dunk astronomers thought it was.  Which is unfortunate.  Given that it's likely that most of the planets hosting life do not have life forms advanced enough to communicate across interstellar space, it'd be nice to have a way to find out they're out there without leaving Earth.  And one of the better possibilities for that has just been shown to be unreliable.

News from the Deep Carbon Observatory, a project that is the collective effort of over a thousand geologists, chemists, and biologists, is more encouraging.  Most of us have the idea that life is only possible on the thin skin of the Earth, and that if you go very deep into the Earth's crust conditions become quickly hot enough and pressurized enough that nothing could live.

Well, that's not true.

The DCO released research last week showing that the amount of life in the "deep biosphere" might amount to as much as twenty billion tons, meaning it would outweigh all of humanity put together by a factor of twenty.  The DCO team drilled three miles deep into the seafloor, and investigated the deepest gold and diamond mines ever created, and everywhere they looked, they found life.

Lots of it.

They found life flourishing at a temperature of 122 C -- twenty-two degrees above the boiling point of water.  They found it in pitch darkness, where there's nothing around to eat except for rocks.  They found it at crushing pressures in the deepest trenches in the ocean.

Sounds like we might have to redefine what we mean by "conditions hospitable for life."

And, germane to the topic of today's post, it will broaden what conditions lie in the "Goldilocks Zone" -- the region surrounding a star where its planets would experience temperatures that are neither too warm nor too cold, but "just right."  Apparently "just right" has a broader range than we ever dreamed, which means that a great many more planets out there might host life than we ever expected.

However, it bears mention that the denizens of the deep biosphere are all simple.  Nothing much more complex than a nematode (roundworm) has been found down there.  So if you were hoping for running across the Morlocks, so far that's a no.

But it's a pretty exciting finding nonetheless, and supports a contention I've had for years -- that life is common in the universe.  Or, as Ellie Arroway put it in Contact, "If not, it'd be an awful waste of space."  Now it's on the chemists and atmospheric scientists to find us a better way to tell that it's there, since the oxygen idea just got shot down.

We'll see what they come up with.  Because I'm certain that it's only a matter of time before we prove beyond any doubt that we're not alone in the universe.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Murky waters

Yesterday I ran into the latest completely bogus suggestion from the alternative medicine nuts:

"Hydrogen-rich structured water."

Plain old water, apparently, isn't good enough, we need special water, water that is different by virtue of having lots of properties that make complete sense as long as you failed high school chemistry.

They start off with a bang:

You have probably heard that the human body is two-thirds water. It may surprise you to know that over 99 percent of the molecules in your body are water molecules. So how is it possible that 99 percent of the molecules don’t do anything?  That question inspired leading scientists to put water under a microscope.  What researchers discovered was a fourth phase of water known as structured water.  Meaning, the molecules are structured or ordered for cells to absorb them.

There are only a few problems with this paragraph, to wit:

• Two-thirds does not equal 99%.
• The water molecules in your body actually do lots of things, which is why if I took all of the water out of your body, you would die.
• You can't see water molecules under a microscope.
• There are actually eleven known phases of water, each of which exists at various ranges of temperature and pressure, as shown on the diagram below:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So already we're off to a great start, with one of the highest bullshit-to-text ratios I've ever seen.

Then we're told that not only is this product "structured," it's "hydrogen-enriched," so that it is "Powered to flush toxins and waste...  Activated to replicate and convert energy...  Energized for lasting alertness... [and] Optimized for better hydration."

Now, there are two ways they could add hydrogen to water; as hydrogen gas (gases are soluble in water; witness seltzer), or as hydrogen ions.

Neither would be a good idea.

If you add hydrogen gas to water, presumably under pressure (the way they make soda), then when you open the bottle, it'll fizz out, just as the carbon dioxide does when you pop the cap off a beer, which you'll probably need to do to recover from the stress of reading all of this.  The problem is, forcing hydrogen gas into water under pressure and then giving it to an unsuspecting person is problematic, from the standpoint of the fact that hydrogen gas is explosive.

Remember the Hindenburg?

Yeah, that.

Adding the hydrogen in ionic form isn't any better.  When you add hydrogen ions to water, you've created what chemists call an "acid."  The more you add, the more acidic it becomes, and the more the pH of the solution drops.  Plain old lemonade has a pH of about 5 or so, depending on how strong you make it; this corresponds to a hundred-times higher concentration of hydrogen ions than plain water (pH of 7).  Commercial vinegar has a pH of about 3, meaning it has a hundred times higher concentration still (recall that pH is a logarithmic scale; each pH point corresponds to a tenfold change in the hydrogen ion concentration).

So if the hydrogen-enriched water people are right, we should all be drinking vinegar.  Or, better yet, the sulfuric acid from your car battery, which at a pH of about 1 has a million times more hydrogen ions than pure water does.

Healthful stuff, battery acid.  Really "hydrogen-enriched."  It'd certainly flush out the toxins, rather in the way that Drano cleans out the pipes in your kitchen.  I doubt you'd feel all that "activated and optimized" afterwards, however.

Once again, we have a product that is so much snake oil -- water with some minerals added, that is then marketed as the next big thing in health.  The only benefit from this stuff is to the bank accounts of the people who are peddling it.

So there you are.  How to make water even, um, waterier.  Or something.  And how we should all give up on regular old water.

Myself, I'm thinking of switching to scotch.

Deep waters

There's something about water that is mysterious.  It comprises, by some estimates, an average of 65% of the mass of living tissue.  We're drawn to it, and not just because we need a steady source of it to remain alive.  Look at how attracted we are by lakes, rivers, and oceans; consider how much more people will pay for houses with a view of a body of water.

Even the chemists tell us that water is weird.  It has a number of odd properties, including high polarity, specific heat, and heat of vaporization, and is (to my knowledge) the only common substance that expands when it freezes.  (If it weren't for this peculiarity, ice would sink, and bodies of water would freeze from the bottom up -- so there would probably be a permanent ice layer at the bottom of the world's lakes and oceans.)

So I guess it's no surprise that the woo-woos love making claims about water.  It seems like lately I've been seeing more and more of them -- mostly advertisements for devices that allegedly make your water... better.  Or healthier.  Or more nutritious.  Or waterier.  It's hard to tell, sometimes, exactly what they are claiming, because they don't seem all that sure about it themselves.

Take the "MRET Water Activator," offered for sale by the Sound & Consciousness Institute of San Francisco.  Here's the claim:

The patented i-H2O Activation System is the most effective hydration technology available today. This easy-to-use wellness breakthrough allows you to transform ordinary, filtered water into ultra-hydrating, "living water" within 30 minutes. During the automated i-H2O activation process, the chaotic structure of water molecules is transformed into a single-file alignment, mimicking the body's own natural state of healthy cell water, thereby creating optimally energized, bio-available water.

I don't know about you, but the idea of my water molecules marching along in single file is a little... creepy.  But no worries, because they put you on notice right away that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about:

This device infuses the Schumann Resonance (7.83 hertz) into the water. The Schumann Resonance is an electromagnetic frequency that resonates in our atmosphere between the earth and the ionosphere. It is triggered by lightning, which strikes every second somewhere on the planet. Based on the laws of brainwave entrainment, this frequency entrains every brain on the planet (including animals) into this state, which is right on the threshold of the brainwave states of theta and alpha. In fact, over millions of years, we have become addicted to this frequency and it is a core part of who we are as humans. However, the problem is that this frequency gets obscured in cities by all of the ambient electromagnetism. NASA has found that astronauts actually get sick when they go outside of the atmosphere and don't receive the frequency. Currently, all astronauts now receive this frequency electromagnetically.

What is it with these people and the Schumann Resonance?  They love the Schumann Resonance.  For those of you who aren't aficionados of obscure features of atmospheric physics, the Schumann Resonance is an ultra-low-frequency electromagnetic standing wave in the ionosphere.  Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

This global electromagnetic resonance phenomenon is named after physicist Winfried Otto Schumann who predicted it mathematically in 1952. Schumann resonances occur because the space between the surface of the Earth and the conductive ionosphere acts as a closed waveguide. The limited dimensions of the Earth cause this waveguide to act as a resonant cavity for electromagnetic waves in the ELF band. The cavity is naturally excited by electric currents in lightning. Schumann resonances are the principal background in the electromagnetic spectrum beginning at 3 Hz and extend to 60 Hz, and appear as distinct peaks at extremely low frequencies (ELF) around 7.8 (fundamental), 13.7, 19.6, 25.5, 31.4, 37.3 and 43.2 Hz.

It has nothing to do with brainwaves.  It is not "obscured in cities."  NASA doesn't "give this frequency to astronauts."  And we are not "addicted to this frequency."

Oh, and there's no way to "infuse a frequency" into water.

If you keep reading, though, the claims just get wilder and wilder.  "Activated water" that has been "infused with the Schumann resonance" has the property of "super liquidity."  It's "bio-available."  (As opposed to ordinary water, which is just "available.")  And then after telling you how all of this nonsense has to do with the special properties of water, they tell you you can use their device to "activate" other substances...

...such as oil.  Which last I checked doesn't have much water in it.

If "MRET Activated Water" isn't bad enough, just today I ran into another claim, this one that we should all be drinking water in its "fourth phase."  What the hell could that mean, you might ask?

Well, you all learned in grade school how substances usually exist in one of three states -- solid, liquid, and gas.  (As you'll see in a moment, that is a dramatic oversimplification.)  But these people claim that these phases somehow aren't good enough, that we should be drinking water in a "fourth phase:"

4th Phase is a liquid water purifier!

It removes and renders harmless an enormous number of contaminants that are commonly found in water, whether from natural or man-made sources. It then puts water into what scientists are now calling the fourth phase of water (a liquid that has a beautiful, crystalline structure to it).

Ah, yes, those conveniently anonymous "scientists," always ready and waiting to be trotted out to support whatever idiotic claim is being made.

So what, exactly, is this stuff?  Check out the FAQs, and you find out:

4th Phase is a concentrated, water based solution of ionic minerals. The mother concentrate is made by extracting mineral salts from the stone, biotite mica, which are then diluted in purified water, bottled and sold, primarily as a liquid based water purifier. The resulting minerals are in sulfate form rather than the chloride form that most companies offer (The requirement for sulfur is nearly twice the requirement for chloride in the human body).

This, they tell us, comes out of the work of Dr. Gerald Pollack of the University of Washington, who tells us the following:

Dr. Pollack asserts that water, in it’s [sic] maximum potential as a substance that enlivens and hydrates us, needs to be highly energized and it reaches this high energy state through a variety of ways, one of which is that it creates this liquid crystalline structure when it is in the presence of external energy sources like light (sunlight, for example.) When water is in this high energy state, it mimics the water that surrounds our cells and is found throughout the body, and it has many other properties as well.

I'm so relieved to hear that now the water in my body will have many other properties!  That sounds great!  I'd hate to think that my water had "few properties."

What's interesting is how these people are using half-truths, incorrectly interpreted research, and out-and-out falsehoods to sell a product.  For example, the whole premise of a "fourth phase" of water, a mystical and energized phase, ignores the fact that the chemists have known for decades that water can exist in at least eighteen different phases (fifteen solid phases, plus liquid, vapor, and supercritical fluid), depending on temperature and pressure:

And unfortunately for these claimants, here at sea-level atmospheric pressure and typical room temperature, we're stuck in one boring old phase: liquid.

Now, Dr. Pollack himself, as far as I have been able to find, seems to have some degree of credibility in his field, and has been the author of a good many peer-reviewed papers.  On the other hand, the fault may not lie entirely with the purveyors of "4th Phase" hijacking Pollack's work.  At least one of Pollack's colleagues, neurobiologist Alexander Stein, has given an evaluation of Pollack's research that is nothing short of scathing:

Dr. Pollack is an embarrassment to his field and his University. This book [Cells, Gels, and the Engines of Life] is a collection of old results (from as far back as 50 years ago) that puzzled the world's scientists at the time they were first published. There has been much progress in the intervening decades that Dr. Pollack would do well to read and understand. All of the ancient science upon which Pollack's argument depends has since been explained or refuted. People are entitled to write, or say, whatever they choose. However, that doesn't necessarily make it true. Before purchasing this book, people should browse Dr. Pollack's publication record. They should note that in those instances when his science has escaped the peer-review process, references to his ridiculous opinions about cell biology have been omitted. Prospective buyers should also note that this book was published using the private funds of Pollack's family, and not solicited or endorsed by any scientific organization. I fully support anyone who wishes to read this comedy of ignorance, provided they then turn the pages of a good cell biology textbook. This book may change the way you look at the world around you, but so will psychoactive drugs and head trauma. Pollack is a laughing-stock. He will tell you that he is a persecuted genius. It is important to remember, though, that sometimes people are laughed at because they are genuine fools.

Ouchie.  So suffices to note that Pollack himself may not exactly be the solidest foundation on which to rest your claim.

Now, I'm not a chemist, and I would be unqualified to comment upon Pollack's research into the properties of water; but I do teach biology, and I can say without particular fear of error that the claims of the "4th Phase" people with respect to the biological effects of this Magic Water are bogus.  The bottom line: save your money.  Plain old tap water (in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, at least) is safe, hydrates you just fine, and has the additional advantage of being cheap.

So, there you have it; yet another example of combining "a fool and his money are soon parted" and "there's a sucker born every minute."  Myself, I think you can solve the whole thing by switching to red wine.  Except... uh-oh...

Tomorrow: Do the antioxidants in red wine actually prevent cancer?  Or do people just like getting drunk?