Techno H2O

versus towards and sell and so forth. Yeah, she did not appreciate my Anglo Philip ways. Now, Julie, when I invited you onto the show, I did what I normally do, and I extended to my guest the opportunity to pick whatever topic he or she might like, and you picked a really cool one. Yeah. I wanted to talk about water.

And all of this came from some stuff that's been in the news lately thanks to Gwyneth Paltrow talking about water and this idea that water might have a conscious, which is well interesting, Yeah, a little little let's say, eccentric, uh,

compared to the standard scientific view. So we're gonna be looking at a lot of different kinds of technology and water and whether you know, there's gonna be some In fact, the first half we're really going to be talking a lot about technology that m M, it's probably best described as pseudo scientific, and then towards the end we'll talk about some actual technology that's based on hard science and

how that affects water. And so that's we're looking at everything here because water, as it turns out, really important to us. Yeah, and and I just want to say

this too. I was thinking about this, um there there's some magical you know, thinking that goes into water, and I thought, you know, just this really harkens back someone like Richard Dawkins, who has this book The Magic of Reality and really celebrates, like, you know, the the actual reality of our physical world is far more astounding than some of the sort of things that we like to dream up protect upon it. So that's why I thought

this is cool. You can you can really look at water and see that it is this phenomenal substance, which I guess we could kind of tip our hats out and say thanks, because we wouldn't really be here at least in this form possibly with well definitely not this form. We would be a very different form without water. So I wanted to start with just some random, uh well

not really random about some some facts about water. Now, a lot of this stuff is gonna sound like third grade science, and it should, but it's stuff that's important because the a lot of the pseudo scientific technology is really based upon a lack of understanding or it's dependent upon consumers lack of understanding of basic science. So water, let's go ahead, get out there. H two O. It's a molecule. Two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, making

sweet sweet molecular love. Until you get a water molecule. Uh. And we've got the three basic states, right. You've got water is the liquid state. You've got ice, which is the solid state, and then water vapor or steam, which is the gaseous state, which all contributes to the water cycle. Should we do a quick thing on that? For sure? The sun burning down so very hot upon like say a lake or the ocean, and then what does that

do with it? It It creates a gaseous state. You get some waterporation goes into the atmosphere where it hangs out there and it it becomes condensation in those clouds and when you get a perfect amount of saturation and condensation and you have some particulates in the area, then droplets can form around those particulates. If they get heavy enough, they fall and then we get and then you have the collection of it again in oceans, lakes and rivers. Yeah.

Magical stuff really. And when you think about it, and this is also going to be important in our conversation, it's a closed system. This water is not leaving the planet. It's not coming in from outside the planet. Pretty much the water that we have here today has been here for millions of years. Closed system. And I'm doing like wild gesticulating hand right now, I'm up at arms and an energetically open way, right, so it can change forms.

And when I say energetically, yes, yes, yes, yeah, it's not it's not confined to a single state or anything like that. Also, what's what I think is one of the coolest things about water is it's different from a lot of other liquids and that when it freezes, it expands. Now, generally speaking, when stuff gets cold, it tends to contract. You have molecular movements, slows down, right, That's essentially what we're talking about with temperature. If something is hot, you've

got a lot more molecular movement going on. When something is very cold, there's a lot less. So when we say zero kelvin, when we talk about absolute zero, we're talking about the absence of molecular movement, right, or atomic movement,

if you want to think of it that way. So, if you're talking about water, the interesting thing is that as you cool it down own it does start to contract until you get to about four degrees celsius and between four and zero zero being the freezing point zero celsius, water begins to expand and by the time it h's freezing point, it will expand about nine. Now this is different from most other liquids. Most of the liquids when

they freeze are they contract, they get they shrink. So the reason for this is the actual molecular structure of water. It has these hydrogen atoms in it. Hydrogen is a very reactive element. It likes to bond with other stuff. Um, you'll see that all over nature. When you start looking

into compounds, hydrogen is in the mix a lot. So hydrogen will end up making these uh, these crystalline structures as it starts to freeze where it's spaces out the molecules a bit, so it doesn't it's not as compact as it is in liquid form, and that's unusual. Not a lot of liquids do that, So I think that's pretty cool. It also means that water ice form is less dense than water, so that's my ice floats on

top of water. Yeah. And according to in October twenty nine article in The Medium, So I love this quote. It says that's one reason why life on Earth has flourished. If ice were denser than water, lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up, almost certainly preventing the kind of chemistry that makes life possible. So thank you weird freezing properties of ice. Yeah, we actually really lucked out there. And also things to remember water. The boiling point is

a hundred degrees celsius. That's tune or twelve fahrenheit, and that is at sea level because barometric pressure will change the boiling point of water in back pressure in general changes the boiling point. So if you have lower pressure, you need less heat to boil water. If you have high pressure, then you need more heat to boil water. So if you were at the top of Mount Everest. You could boil water if you just get it up to sixty eight degrees celsius, which is a hundred fifty

or degrees fahrenheit. It's kind of cool. I would like to boil water on Mount Everest. I really would there. That would be the hard part, and I need to bring my own oxygen. It might be a bit of a thing. It's it's definitely a thing. Now. Um have you seen the videos of people taking boiling water, like a pan of it and going outside in the freezing cold and the ice crystals form. I've seen videos like that. I've never looked into them. It's pretty cool. It's actually

called the Ma Pembo or excuse me Pembo effect. It's named after Tanzanian student Erasta ma Pembo, and that's in the nineties. He actually noticed this. It was like in a cookery class or something. And so apparently even Aristotle knew about this, and you know, it was wondering like why does this happen? And so there is an idea out there that warmer water than cold water, yes, because it's giving off more of its energy. Interesting, and so it's and I'm not gonna go way deep into it.

But it's sort of like a momentum idea here. There's there's a great Have you ever heard of a column called the Straight Dope? I have, yeah, Straight Dope. It started off as a a weekly column in a Chicago, a free Chicago newspaper and eventually became syndicated across the world. And one of the questions I remember reading in there was does cold water boil faster than hot water? And does hot water freeze faster than cold water? And it drove the writer insane as he was as he was

looking more and more deeply into it. He says, all right, it turns out that extremely hot water will freeze faster than warm water. But you know, okay, wait, wait, no, I got that wrong. Wait. It says that you can just tell that he was that this was mind bending for him. And there are some very kind of mind bending facts about water that seems counterintuitive, like why would

warmer water creeze faster? Right? Cool faster than cold water? Yeah, so there's definitely some some weird sort of contradictions there other things that are important to remember. Out of all the water that's on Earth, only about three percent of it is fresh water. The rest of its sea water, and the stuff that we find in lakes, streams, ponds, and swamps makes up about point three percent of all the world's water. Most of the freshwater on Earth is

trapped in glaciers. Yeah. Uh, and so we actually don't really want to mount No, No, that would be a bad thing for many many reasons. Already kind of Miami is already really facing some big issues with rising sea levels, and it's just gonna get more difficult. Uh So, the average American household, this is one of those facts that you hear all the time that should really kind of

open your eyes. The average American household uses more than one hundred thousand gallons of water per year, which includes both indoor and outdoor use. So watering your law and all that kind of stuff. Um, and that means you're average family could fill an Olympic size swimming pool in a little more than six years time. So have you ever seen those signs before that say if it's yellow, let it mellow in restrooms? Yes, this is one of the reasons a hundred thousand gallons. Yeah, a lot of

that is from flushing toilets. Yeah, I think stuff you should know as Chuck Bryant has talked about that particular philosophy before and stuff. You should know. I remember listening to an old episode where he talked about it, and I thought, you go, dude, uh, and then go again because you haven't flushed yet. So he's mellow like that he is. Then you have the the fact about the average American using about a hundred gallons of water per day.

Meanwhile your average resident of Sub Saharan Africa uses between two to five. Yeah, I look away shamefully. It's tough. I mean, this is a tough thing to look at.

And then, of course water is incredibly important. Not only is it incredibly prevalent on the Earth, not only does it cover most of the surface of the Earth, it also accounts for between fifty and seventy of a pers body weight, which I think is why, and what will come to this later, why we sort of have fetishized water is something to consume or to douse ourselves in sure, and it comes down to this idea of you know, purity in a way, right, we are mostly water, so

therefore this substance has a particular meaning. In fact, we can talk about that a little bit. One of the important things to remember. One of the reasons why some of the more snake oil type technologies are able to flourish is because we have ascribed certain meanings to water. I mean, it factors heavily in culture and mythology and legends.

I mean it's it's a really important idea. Well, I have to say that I feel like in terms of religion, it really caught hold, you know, around the nine this association between cleanliness and godliness social morality, and I thought, you know, I wonder what, what was that always the case? Then I was looking at a chapter on clean from the book How We Got to Now Six Innovations That Changed the World by Stephen Johnson, and he was saying, hey,

that we weren't always so obsessed with water. And he said that as a child, Louis the thirteenth of France was not bathed once until he was seven years old, and basically like that's how people rolled back then. But then, you know, you fast forward to a time period in which we have a robust plumbing infrastructure and we have more access to clean water. And Kellogg comes along, Oh, Kellogg Love, do you remember the movie the title that movie? Yes,

the Road to Wellville. Yes, yes, the road to Wellville. Yeah. Kellogg was a little little, a little bit on the extreme side with cleanliness and his ideas of you know, some some of them were very very well based in science. Some of them went well beyond what science could support. Well, there was a lot of lon I irrigations. Yeah, yeah, yeah, less said about that, the happier I am. Really you don't want to talk, because we could talk for a long time about we could we could do that, but

I'm gonna choose Okay. So anyway, it's a good example of how, you know, we take water and we're trying to irrigate every single bit of ourselves, inch of us because we want to attain some sort of I don't know of a symbolic level of purity. And then that's where you see all of a sudden, you know, especially I want to seem like in the nine nineties, water being bottled and distributed with this idea that there's you know,

you could have some really good, you know, quality water. Yeah, like there's some not all waters are equivalent, some waters are better than others, and that you know, you could it doesn't matter if you were able to take two different bottles of water or twenty different bottles of water plus municipal tap water and do a chemical and now this improved that there is no discernible difference in the

chemical makeup of all of these different things. That's not going to change people's minds about which water is best. I mean, there are people who are going to be convinced about that, and I mean there are things that can go into changing uh slight subtle differences in waters, like taste or smell that can happen. But it's also true that about twenty of all bottled waters are actually

just municipal tap water that's been put into bottles. Well, and you know, you and I were talking about this earlier. The fact of the matter is is that you know, there's there's really only two ways that tap water is collected, right, and um, one is you know ground water, so all that stuff that's seeped into the into the ground, and the other is you know lakes and rivers and so

on and so forth. And of course you know, if you're going to collect those things and you're going to try to purify them to su yeah, because they're going to have some contaminants in them, right, But The fact of the matter is all that water eventually has made its way through some sort of substance, probably was like a fecal matter substance, because if you look at everything that has ever lived, every species um you know that has lived and died, then you have poop and you

have their decomposing bodies and oil, not to mention urine. Yeah. Yeah, In fact, I did an episode of Forward Thinking where I talked about water and at the end of it they had me have a glass of water and I took a sipmen m tristerratops as a little a little just a little gag, a little joke. But yes, that's absolutely true, and so that is another thing that will

come into play with the pseudoscience. Let's just kind of look at some of these because there's tons of examples of different approaches, and they again mostly rely on people not really being scientifically literate when it comes to just things like water and you know, basic science. So one of those, there's Julie drinking water right now on Mike. What did you hear it? Oh yeah, I heard that. I just want to make sure you guys know it's good. No, you really are. I didn't even think to bring water

in here. So I feel like I've I've been slouching off on the research. I'll haven't talking to you after the episode. So one of the things that has come up is this idea of water clusters and water clusters

in the technology world. It essentially says that there's usually some sort of device that is supposed to induce water to like groups of water molecules to cluster together in particular patterns, and that this somehow makes water more effective in hydration, or it ends up being helpful in some other really vague way, like it's supposed to help your health somehow, that the actual physical orientation of water molecules changes how we take it in where they cluster, yeah,

or how or what patterns, like if it clusters in a hexagonal pattern, or if there or if it's a cluster of five molecules rather than ten molecules. That's actually one of the products I looked at talked about, like the water that comes out of your tap clusters and ten molecule groups, but our water clusters and five molecule groups, so it'll be absorbed by your body more effectively. All of it was meaningless. I know, see, like I'm already trying to transpose some sort of meaning on this, like

numerology or that helps. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely weird. That's another thing is that they talk about it removing toxins. But again that's a very broad and vague topic that doesn't necessarily mean anything. So, uh, here's the deal. Water molecules do associate with each other within any body of water, like whether that's a lake or a glass of water or whatever. They do associate with each other, and we

often will refer to those associations as clusters. But this is purely a conceptual term, like we're using it as as a way of describing this very brief association. And when I talk about brief, I mean on the matter of a few pico seconds, so they might be clustered in five or seven this configuration for for for for

less than a fraction of a second. I mean, you know, a pico second is a very short amount of time, so it pa say it's one trillionth of a second, So we're talking about so short that there's no way a human would ever be able to perceive it, much less be able to take some sort of beneficial effect from it. And it's constantly rearranging itself. It's a fluid, it's constantly These associations don't like lock in until you

free something, and then you've got a crystalline structure. But if it's if it's in liquid form, it's never locked in. See there's there's no device that you could turn on. It's gonna zap it with electricity or shine some sort of weird light on it, and that automatically makes the water form itself into this molecular structure. That's just not the way water works. Well, I feel like in even trying to get to some sort of logic on it

and explain it, it's futile. Like even just trying to you can tell like I see right, there's nothing to this, right, yeah, I mean it's it. And again, like the only reason why it works is if someone does not know how water, you know, liquid water, how how that's arranged. And that's understandable that you wouldn't know that because it's not necessarily something you would learn in school. I mean, it certainly wasn't something I learned in school until I got up

to like pretty high level chemistry. But there are other ones that rely on things like piezoelectric effect of quartz crystals. Which this is where they get you because they mentioned something that does have a basis in science, but then they apply it in a way that doesn't make anything. That's what I was thinking. Okay, we know this as

kinetic energy, but is this really going to bolster my water? Right? Yeah, in this case, we're talking about things like a water filter system that you might have for a picture, like you know, a picture of water. You've got the little filter built in, but instead of it just being a

regular filter, filters do work. We'll talk about them later. Uh, it would actually include a quartz crystal with the claim that there's a piece of electric fact that's going to zap the water and structure it in a specific way. Now we've already covered the structure. The piece of electric part. Quarts does have a piece of electric feature. Piece of electric means that if you apply a kinetic stress, like you squeeze a crystal, it will induce an electric current

really and induces voltage. So uh, same sort of thing though, if you apply a electricity to a crystal, it will then vibrate. This is the basis for quartz watches. So that part sounds really cool because you realize, oh, piece of electric that's a that's a big scientific word, and you look into it. If you do some just casual research, Oh this is a real thing. It's not a made

up word. But if you don't look any further than that, then you don't realize that, oh, this is a real word, but used for something that makes no sense, like there's no scientific basis for what it's being applied toward. Well in the mechanism too, right, like you're talking about kind of storing this kinetic energy and water, Then yeah, how do you do that? That's kind of yeah, you know again,

sure it's we live in a close system. You know, there's a button on the filter that you're supposed to push to actually add stress to the courts crystal, because I don't understand why. I don't understand where the mechanical stress comes from to even affect this voltage change in the first place, but at least not in the sense of a filter. I mean, obviously in things like watches and stuff you have, uh, you know, various mechanisms or electronic circuits there that are meant to do this, But

in a filter, how's that? I don't know. I don't know the ends. Well, yeah, I mean there're the how do you dispense of the charge in the first place? Um? Yeah, what was the charge? Actually? Like how what is the mechanism for the charge to quote unquote structure this water? As it turns out? And we'll talk about this again. Pure water electricity and pure water not not such a great mix because you know, you probably have heard like, if there's a thunderstorm, you should get out of the pool.

Well that's absolutely true. But the water itself is not a good conductor of electricity, not not if you don't have ions dissolved in the water. If you have ions dissolved in the water, then those ions are a great conductor for electricity, But pure water not such a good conductor. What about hydrogen eated water? Have you heard of this before? I had not until until you had brought it to my attention. Yeah. So if you think, oh, hydrogen eated,

does that mean you add hydrogen? Yeah, that's what it means. Uh. The claim is that the water offers some sort of active hydrogen, which in chemistry would refer to atomic hydrogen, as in a single hydrogen atom. But we usually encounter hydrogen as H two where two hydrogen atoms have bonded together. What's the that's the ordinary elemental hydrogen. So hydrogenated water, boy, I'm never gonna be able to say it without HyG is rural juror yeah, bob blah blah blab blog is

really tripping me up. Hydrogenated water. It's um often referred to as being filled with like an antioxidant kind of effect. It can take care of free radicals, which you know, in health terms, you probably have heard these before. They have some link to various ailments, including things like cancer and so any oxidants are important in the sense that it helps eliminate these free radicals so that they don't

have the opportunity to, you know, trigger something catastrophic. But the thing is that your body already has any occidents, and in fact, usually it is more than capable of handling the vast majority of things that you're going to encounter alone. You don't need to supplement it um. And that's assuming that the water that you're having actually does have a supplement to it. As for adding actual hydrogen, atomic hydrogen to water not so effective. Because we just

mentioned that hydrogen is incredibly reactive. It wants to bond. It's kind of like you, Julie, just wants to make friends. That's why I'm sitting right next to you so uncomfortably close right now, just trying to bond with you. It's actually been very difficult for us to make sure that the microphones don't have feedback from their proximity. Yeah, I mean, this isn't weird right right away from your head? You know it's weird? Is a is a charged word. I

don't like to use the word weird. Uncomfortable, certainly physically uncomfortable. But getting back to the hydrogenated water, so, yeah, you might get like a concentration of H two in water. In effect, when you do that, you're really talking about a hydrogen suspension in water. So it's not exactly the

same thing. Um, but there have been some studies I've shown that hydrogen can act kind of light in any like an antioxidant, but it may not be that it's truly effective in the amounts you're going to find and in hydrogenated water. So it's yeah, so you're saying that I can't go smoke like hot box an entire boxes cigarettes and then just drink some hydrogenated water and cancel it out. I'm sad to tell you that that in fact is yeah, you can't do that. I mean you

can't expect it to work. I mean and talk about magical thinking. Yeah, right there, Yeah, it really is. So. Yeah, it's H two water would be a molecular hydrogen in water, and if you drank it, you might have some mild antioxidant effects, but it's very little measurable effect for some reason. I just I imagine that would give you the toots.

That's probably not right, but no, no, but you know that is one other thing to remember though, not the toots, but the idea that hydrogen gas is a dangerous substance. I mean, it's extremely flammable. Uh, it's you know, I think there was one resource I was reading they're referred to hydrogenated water that would give you explosive results about what poor wording considering what hydrogen You know, you could blow up if you had an amount of hydrogen gas

that caught fire. Now you probably have heard about this Ignoble award. Uh that was given to someone who actually did some research on colonoscopies that went awry. Wow, do you know what I'm talking about hydrogen that was ignited when people were getting like polyps auterized or whatever. So we went from don't know why how we got yeah, colonics to colonoscopies. We're really, you know, really scraping the bottom now. Okay, so let's move on to ionized water. Okay,

do you know about the ionized footpaths? I don't know about these. Please tell me about a long time ago, because you know, I'm that kind of gal. I like to experiment. Um, you know, going to an isolation chamber and into into a big thing of water, right, um, and just see what that's like. I'll do that, right, Get a foot bath that's going to take out the toxins o my body? Sure, okay, yeah, this is called ionic detoxification footpaths, and they were touted as removing toxins

from your body and balancing the cellular energy. Of course they do. Now when you do it, they put you know, some stuff in there. I don't know, like bath salts or something. Sure, you're talking about actual bath salts, not not the street name for that methamphetamine variant, right, the face bath salts. No, But then they give that to you. So it's all inclusive, is what you're telling me. A twenty minutes later, you look down at the water and

it's disgusting and sort of orangey brown and bubbling. It looks like some sort of acidic cauldron. And it's great because it's absolute hooey. Yeah yeah, but I mean it's one of those sort of snake oil thinks, because people who will do these will say, well, look there's the evidence right there of all the impurities in your body coming out. Well, you know, I wanted to look at Dr Andrew Wild and see what he had to say about this, because he takes it integrative medical approach to everything.

So here's someone who's pretty steeped in science, but he's got sort of open mind in terms of like what holistically might be able to to help people anyway. He says, quote, this is all complete nonsense. The Guardian, unlimited and unlined British newspaper sent a doctor to have an ionic detox foot bath. He took water samples before and after and sent into a lab for analysis, and neither sample contained

any toxins. And when the reporter suspected that the discolored water might be due to rust, he tried an experiment. He rigged up a bowl of salt water with two metal nails attached to a car battery to simulate the metal electrodes or excuse me, electrodes used in ionic detox foot baths. And that water turned brand with some sludge on top, and the same thing that happens with these footbaths, and the change in color was due to iron from the nails. Uh. Yeah, yeah, we see this a lot too, righte.

We see we see treatments, not just water treatments, but other treatments where there are alternative explanations for the transformation of some material that's made contact with you, rather than just you know, this was in your body and now it's out. Sometimes it's no, this is what happens after a chemical reaction has occurred that may or may not

require a person to be present for it to actually happen. Um. So yeah, well, uh, there's also ionized water that's meant for drinking, not just for dunking your tip season two and um. One of the one of the products that I've seen has actually a whole suite of products claims to use electrolysis to ionize water. So this water is supposed to be better for you in lots of different ways,

depending upon which company is offering the product. But it's very similar to the other claims, like it's supposed to get you hydrated faster, or remove toxins, are healthier in some other way. But here's the thing. To a chemist, ionized water doesn't mean anything. Uh. You can't really ionize water. You can have dissolved ions in water. Uh. And ions are are atoms that have either gained or lost an

electron from their elemental form. And so at this point when you talk about or their atomic form, I should say so when you're looking at an ion, it has a net charge because it means that now there are an unequal number of protons to electrons. So if there are too fuel electrons, that has a positive charge. If there are too many has a negative charge, too many being compared to the atomic version of that particular element. So you can have those dissolved in water. But that's

different than saying ionized water. It's saying that would be water with ionized particles dissolved in it. It's two different things. So once in a while, water molecules will dissociate and turn into hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions. That's still not ionized water, but it means that the that one of the hydrogen atoms splits off and comes an ion, and you have the hydroxide. That's hydrogen and oxygen just one

single hydrogen atom one single oxygen atom. So you could have ions of both of those, but that process doesn't. It takes a while, and the reverse process takes very little time. So the process of hydrogen and hydroxide ions recombining to make water happens very very quickly. So it turns out that if you were to look at a billion hydrogen or a billion water molecules, you might find two instances of hydrogen and hydroxide ions out of it, out of a billion. So very little of it happens.

It doesn't, It doesn't have any sort of meaningful amount. Now, electrolysis is a real thing too, just like piece electric, so that that's using electricity to break down stuff. Well yeah, I mean actually it's used to turn purified urine into breathable air and has been used by NASA for thirteen years. Yeah, it's also what some companies are using to harvest hydrogen. Hydrogen as it turns out as hard to get hold of. It's usually bonded with something else, and so we have

to spend energy to get hydrogen. One of the ways is to run an electric current through water to break down molecular bonds and release oxygen and hydrogen and then harvest hydrogen that way. So you can do it, but using pure water is very difficult because, like I was saying before, pure water doesn't really conduct electricity if you have ions in the water that allows electricity to conduct through it. So you might have something like a um magnesium ions in there in order for you to be

able to do some electrolysis of the water. Uh, but it is, it is a real thing. So often you'll again find claims from from technology manufacturers that say this electrolysis device will ionize your water, and that doesn't mean anything. And also the devices they're selling probably not putting out enough electric current to actually do anything to the water.

So yeah, I mean, one of the themes that keeps emerging when we're talking about this is this idea that these um the molecular structures, Yes, you can manipulate them, but that but these sort of changes or splits are less transient. Yeah, yeah, they are minor, they don't last very long, so it's, you know, effectively, most people just say there's no change because in a meaningful way, there

isn't a real change. But what if you're like, you have this this cup of water, you're staring on it and you're really concentrating, like you are thinking of the most beautiful unicorn ever. Okay, well that existed before the dinosaurs. Right, So it's a Thursday, is what you're saying. Right, That's how I spend my thursdays. Yeah, okay, say I'm having really super fantasies, warm fuzzy thoughts while staring at water. Yeah,

what are you getting out? What I'm getting is like maybe like maybe that water can be like conscious, Like it could really jive to this idea that you have of this magical you know, creature. So you're and then you would drink it and you would feel magical. So you're talking, you're talking about some some beliefs that would be championed by masaru Imoto. Then yes, so Masumoto, who we're recording this in November two thousand fourteen. He passed

away in October. Yeah, so, uh. Mr Ramoto was a Japanese entrepreneur among other things, and an author, and he had written a couple of books about his personal experiments with water and emotions. And his claim was that your emotional state could affect the quality of water, and you would be able to see this effect when you would do things like freeze the water. Was about to say, like, we've talked about water being transparent, how do you how

do you glimpse into this water consciousness? You freeze it? Yeah, and that he he had claimed that water that came from a pure source, not just pure and chemically, but pure with emotion would form more beautiful crystalline structures. So a snowflake from such water would be, uh, would be more beautiful than water from some other like negative source, Like he had a bunch of a bunch of negative nancies who were just hanging out next to the water

water cooler. The water from that would make ugly snowflakes. I think his initial experiment. And this, by the way, if you guys aren't familiar with this and you've ever seen the movie What the Bleep do we know? He is featured pretty heavily in this movie. Um talking about this, and initially in his experiment, he took something like a hundred Patrio dishes filled with water, and then he froze them. And then some of those Petrio dishes had you know,

positive vibes, the other had negative ones. And that's and then when he looked out in a microscope, he thought he saw these you know, let's not say that. He thought he saw patterns that he felt were as you say, um more symmetrical and beautiful, whereas the negative ones were duller jagged and asymmetrical. And then like he kind of felt fueled by that. So then he did uh sort of variants of this experiment. He taped the name Adolf Hitler to one to a glass of water to see

what happened with that. So clearly water can also read yes, well no, it's just the thought, just even the right if you look at I like your joke, but you know what I'm saying. His idea was like, now I'm looking at this glass of water and Hitler's water. And then he had some other water that was blessed with

holy up by a monk or someone. And then he had another experiment in which I don't know, people two thousand miles away, we're thinking good pure thoughts about this water that he had in his lap, if good vibes at a distance could have effect on this water. So here's the thing, though he didn't really engage in any

sort of blinded tests. No, that is, there was no scientific rigor here, right if he if if you want to prove that there is some sort of emotional effect on water, like from a molecular structure standpoint, which by the way, has absolutely no basis in any kind of science, than what you would have to do is have a double blinded test in which the person observing these crystals has no idea what the origin source of that water was.

They could not know because he knew which samples were supposed to be the pure ones versus the ugly ones, which automatically enters bias into the picture. Beyond that, you're talking about something that's subjective as well. You would have to have a much more objective approach by saying, all right, well, what what constitutes the molecular patterns we would expect with

this happy water versus sad water? Because beautiful is not going to cut it, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as we have all heard, and what one person might find esthetically pleasing, someone else might think is ugly or uh, is not as pleasing, And so this was problematic from start to fill. And the other thing is that no scientists could ever reproduce his results. That's flag And the other thing is okay, so why

can why couldn't they reproduce his results? Well, I mean there's a couple of things that could be going on. One is that you can easily have conta contaminants that would change the structure of the ice crystals. Yeah. In fact, you know, for things like snowflakes and rain drops are particulate is particulate matter is necessary so that they can

form around it. Right, So if you had a pure source of water with no contaminants at all, it would actually be harder for you to form any kind of crystalline structure because it would have a thing to form around. And then the second thing is that that structure is going to vary widely based on the cooling rate. Yeah, so obviously not so scientific. How about have you heard of alkaline water or alkaline water if you prefer Noway, so it's it's the battery in water. Not quite. I

mean you could, but I wouldn't recommend it. Now. This is this is supposed to be water that's supposed to restore your body's pH levels, that you are you are balanced properly um and you know it. The way you do it is you have water that raises the pH level, like the water itself has got a higher pH level than water typically does, and that this can counteract the acids that you encounter. Here's some problems. First of all, pure water can't be alkaline oristic by its very nature.

It can't. It's chemically impossible. Electrolysis won't affect pH levels. Although a lot of places claimed that they have boosted pH levels through electrolysis, that's just not true. For water to be alkaline, you actually have to add metallic ions to it, so that might be sodium or calcium or magnesium. And we get rid of excess acid already we don't need this, uh, we do it through respiration by by

exiling carbon dioxide, we get rid of some acid. Um. We also have this gastric fluid in our stomach that's highly acidic. It would immediately counteract in any kind of alkaline substance that we would drink in. And not only that, but we don't absorb water primarily through our stomachs. We

absorb most of the water through our intestines. Well, when water passes from the stomach to the intestines, you get some pancreatic secretions which raised the pH level and make it alkaline anyway, so you don't even need alkaline water. Regular water becomes alkaline after it goes into your intestine.

Your body does it for you, you know. Rubbert and I just did an episode on oxygen, and mainly because we really want to explore the new material that will store and bind release the gas, not the television network. Does that still exist? I don't know. I haven't watched TV in a while, you know, and I don't know that you can't store and then bind and release that

the actual TV channels. Yeah, but you can with oxygen right. Anyway, we wanted to to explore that, and then we thought, well, let's just look into other matters of oxygen and oxygen bars. And it's the whole thing about like, you know, there's there's twenty one percent oxygen in our atmosphere and that's perfect. That's what we've evolved into, right or that's that's the thing that makes our bodies work. There's no reason to go into an oxygen bar and have oxygen put up

into your nose holes for twenty minutes. It's not. Your body is already perfectly calibrated with the amount that's available in the atmosphere. And that's what reminds me a lot about what we're talking about today, is you know, all these sort of ideas at least like a sort of foe technology, yeah, and are delivering Actually are you know, flying the face of what are finely tuned systems are

doing naturally right? That that is definitely odd because the messages that this is supposed to restore balance, but in reality it's it's taking the thing that actually is balanced

and putting it out of whack. Or if if in fact it works and the technology is actually doing what is claimed to be doing, I haven't even gone into that, but there are a lot of these examples where it may very well be that if you were to disassemble such a device uh that was supposed to change water in some meaningful way, you might find that there's nothing at all there, just a charcoal filter maybe yeah, yeah, which definitely does work. But that's a totally known quantity um.

There's also just a round out the various types of crazy water stuff. There's the concept of energized water, which can cover a huge spectrum of pseudo scientific claims, including things like that use words like vibration, the piece of electric one would be very similar to that, or quantum. Quantum is a great word that can mean anything that

anyone wants it to mean. It's actually I've heard some scientists say that we should retire the word quantum wells and yeah, because it no longer means what it was intended to mean. Now it just kind of means mystical, like, you know, because because things on the quantum level behave in a way that's very different from the classic level of physics. And and because these things that would be impossible on the macro scale are commonplace on the quantum scale.

The quantum world now has this, you know, it's kind of replaced magic for some people. Like now now it's because certain things are possible on the quantum scale. Everything is possible on the quantums. Gale that that's the way the thinking seems to progress. And water is water, right, like the state of water is you know, well, you could have three different states of water, But that doesn't make it quantum and it's still water. It's still a thing.

I guess I'm trying to say is like if it could just magically poof water would be gone, then maybe we would say it's it's water, not water quantum state. Yeah right, it's short injer's water. It's here, but it's not here. The water is only in the pool. If you look at the pool, look in the box. If you look away from the pool, there's no water in the pool. Uh. Yeah, no, we don't. It's it's a

bogus term. But there is plenty of real technology that we use with water to make it uh potable, make it, make it something that we can actually make use of. Filtration is a very basic one. Filtering water is it's incredibly simple. Essentially, you need a filter that has pores, and the smaller those poores, the more uh contaminants it's going to keep out of your water. So essentially you

just pass water through the filter. It holds back the impurities, the pollution microorganisms, uh, and you have a poorous substance. The pores might be if there let's say, oh a micron in size or smaller, that's gonna filter up microns super small. We're talking of a millimeter or one millions of a meter. So from micron you would then go

down to nanometer, so we're talking really small. But if it's a micron in size, it's gonna filter out all the parasitic eggs and larva, which account for a large number of problems where you have people who don't have access to pure, clean drinking water. I mean, larva and parasites cause enormous health problems and a large large populations

around the world, serious serious problem. Um, if you go down to point four microns, so less than half of micron, that's how small you need to get in order to filter out bacteria. So we're talking like a super tiny hole in the filter, uh, or the super tiny holes because we talked about pores in order to be able to filter out bacteria. So that's okay, So tell me if I'm wrong about this. It's like fifty microns that across that would equal one a little sprig of hair.

Let's see it's a hundred it's it's around eighty thousand, a hundred thousand nanometers. So I always try to get some sort of microns really for the diameter of a human hair. But there's no there's a very wide range, yes, And I keep that in mind. Yeah, And then you're talking about so you might say, well, how is that

even possible to make filters that have these pores that's small? Well, a lot of filters end up using other things to help so that they don't need poor is the small So you were mentioning when we were talking about this before we went into the studio. You you say, hey, are you gonna talk about the life straw? And I completely forgot about it, So I'm glad you brought it up. The life straws are really cool device, very simple device.

It's a pipe filter and it's a It's called straw because the way it works is you put one end of it into a body of water and you suck on the other end. It pulls the water through a filtration system so that it filters out the vast majority of things that would be potentially hazardous to you, so

you get you get relatively clean drinking water. The reason I use those qualifiers is because the filter on the life straw has much larger pores than what I was just talking about, So it has has two filters that are porous filters. One of them has pours a hundred microns in size, so that gets the large particulates out of the water, and the next one has poors of fifteen microns in size, so at that size you can

still get like um, some stuff that would be pretty dangerous. However, it also has a chamber that has little beads filled with iodine, and iodine will kill most of the microorganisms that would cause you real problems. After that is an empty chamber where the iodine can continue to work on any kind of micro organisms as it continues through the pipe filter. Next you have active carbon, and the active

carbon is meant to do two things. Attract any other things that have gotten through, and also to remove the terrible smell and taste of iodine from your water, because iodine will create this bitter taste. It does have a distinct smell. It's unpleasant, so the carbon is meant to help take that out. And I've seen different figures on how expensive each LifeStraw would be. Uh the lowest I saw was two dollars per straw, and it's supposed to be able to last for sevens, which is about a

year's worth of water for a single person. And it's great because it's portable, right, I mean, with you anywhere exactly. It's a tiny little thing comparatively speaking, compared to like a municipal filtration system. It's it's it's microscopic practically, but yeah, it's it's it's a neat device, and it's very neat because of its simplicity. But you also have other technology.

Desalination a big one. The basic way of doing this, I mean, there's lots of different ways if you if you really just want to have a very simple way. Let's say you have a bucket and you go out and get some sea water, and you fill you buck it up with some seawater, and then you put a plastic bag over the bucket so you've sealed it off, and you you edge the plastic bag so that it kind of tilts downward at an angle to one side

of the bucket. Heat is going to cause water to evaporate, which will then condense on the inside of the plastic bag, and some of that's going to run down and go into the other end of the plastic bag off to this out of the bucket. That water is going to be pure water it's gonna leave behind the salt. Uh. So that's your basic desalination. So a desalination plant tends to have an enormous boiler where you put seawater, you heat it up to boiling, and you collect the steam

and allow it to condense back into fresh water. That's pretty cool. It's like on a microscale the water cycle. Yeah, it really is the only But there are some issues. One is that you're left with this kind of salty slurry at the end, and uh, what do you do with that? Um, you could body scrap. Yeah, that'd be a good one. That'd be a much better one than what a lot of desalination plants do, which is that

they'll return it to the ocean. Uh. The issue there is that you have this concentrated amount of salt that can do damage to ecosystems. So if you just dump it like on a coral reef, then you've suddenly drastically increased the salinity of that area. That's a problem. Uh, but it is certainly an interesting technology and necessary for a lot of communities that don't have access to freshwater. Uh. Then there's the sling shot, and this is an invention

by a certain Dean Cayman. Are you familiar when Mr Dean Cayman. Yep, that's him, That's the guy. And he created the Segue. He also created the Luke arm which is a cyborg arm that is awesome. It's amazing. There are very variations. If if I were to lose an arm, I would definitely want to look arm. I would prefer to keep my arm, I mean like attached to me, not just in a case. I would like to have my arm. But if I were to lose an arm, I would want to look arm um. And it was

named after Luke Skywalker's kind of awesome. Yeah, yeah, so but the the sling Shot was his approach to how do you get a clean water supply to people who other eyes would not have it in all parts of the world. What what is the most efficient system that he could come up with. And it's similar to a desalination approach. So it's the sling shot uses uh it, well,

it can. It can make up to a quarter of million leaders of clean water per year um with a single one, which is enough to serve the needs of about three people for that year. So that's just one sling shot. You could get multiple ones and obviously increase that number. And it can turn anything like seawater, sewage, or even chemical waste into pure drinking water, which is pretty cool. And he's partnered with Coca Cola in Or

to distribute this two different areas. They actually had a couple of tests UM runs out in Africa that went really well. And they they also try to train like they'll they'll find people local to the community to train them to run the business so that it's all Coca Cola does not have an interest in a direct interest anyway. They're not profiting from it, which is a great thing. UM. They're allowing the locals to take charge of it. They're

just providing the technology. But essentially what goes What happens is dirty water goes into the sling shot through a hose. Um. There's a pump that pulls the water into a boiling chamber. Now, if you're just starting this thing up for the first time, you're having to spend some energy to heat up the boiling chamber to boiling two hundred degrees celsius. The water boils, uh the water vapor the steam that comes up is

clean and so that then goes into a compressor. Now you would think it would normally go through a condensation coil and turn into water. Instead, he puts it through a condenser. And here's why. Remember when we said early on that if you increase the pressure of liquid, it increases the boiling point. That's why. So he compresses the water vapor. That adds about ten degrees celsius of temperature to it in the process, but it also raises the boiling point of the water, so it starts to condense

down into water superheated water. It's above the boiling point, but because of the compression, that boiling point has been raised, so you get superheated water on one side. Now that superheated water goes through a heat exchanger so that the incoming dirty water and the superheated pure water exchange heat. They're in separate parts of the system, so there's no contamination. But the cold dirty water gets flash boiled because it's pulling heat from the superheated water, which then is cool

to room temperature. So you get room temperature water on one side and flash boiling the dirty water on the other side. There's also an exhaust hose that takes all the super nasty gunk of whatever it is that was going in there in the first place, so you do have an exhaust hose as well. But I thought this was a really cool thing. And the neatest thing about it is that that superheated water provides all the heat necessary to keep the boiling chamber at the right temperature.

So once once it gets started, the heat is self sustaining. Okay, now you still have to you still have to pour energy in for the pomps, but not for the boiling chamber. That's very cool, you know, And when when you look at this sort of technology in place, which is so important for countries that don't have access to clean water, it really puts into perspective like, stay here in the United States, how crazy it is that we engage in

this kind of yuck factor. You know, when we talk about water reclamation, we're talking about taking sewer water and essentially purifying it so that it's potable, and a lot of communities will sometimes push back on that because there's that association of you know, fecle met or in my water. Even though the end result is that you have pure, clean drinking water, you can chemically demonstrate that the water itself is not contaminated by any of these other things

that it used to be part of. But there is that there's that psychological barrier. Same thing is true, like we've talked about on tech stuff and on forward thinking about the International Space Station and how they take extremes to try and conserve water as much as possible, and then an ideal system would conserve water from everything from urine to your sweat. It would all get captured, processed, and then you would have clean drinking water and you

would expel anything else in any other contaminants out of space. Um. So there is that thought of people are like, oh, I don't want to drink my own P. You're not drinking You're drinking water that was reclaimed from P and is chemically the exact same stuff that's coming out of your faucet, which spoiler alert has probably been pid at least once through the history of the Earth through something some creatures. Yeah, something somewhere that water has been through it,

you know. Yeah, so you know, and it might think, well, with enough time, well that's a thing like you you get. Um. A lot of this is just semantics. We're talking about this earlier, Like there's a sthantic distancing, like if you can just name it in a different way, you can market it or spin it, then you can get that sort of psychological distancing from the thing that it is.

But that being said, I always go back to this microbiologist whose name escapes me at the moment, but he says, there's a fine patina of feces covering the world, and we forget that. You know every surface, and in the same way, there's your in everywhere in the world. I used to have a an interior design company where our slogan was there's a fine patina of FECs covering everything,

but uh, we went business. I would have thought that you would have had at least some scatological minded No, I don't like that the guy who created the Kloaka bot. Perhaps I did want to mention an unsung hero of water and again Stephen Johnson, he's got that chapter on

clean in his book. He has a PBS series too, called How We Got to Now, But he points out that we largely owe our clean drinking water to this physician John Leal, who had this little idea of like maybe if I put a little chlorine in the water, it would clean it I wonder how I could get a large enough body of water to test this out.

And surreptitiously, he goes to a plant in I believe in New Jersey, Jersey City, and he puts chlorine into the water supply in the early nineteen hundreds to see if if he has any could clean the water or I might poison the entire population of this area. Yeah, it was a palsy thing to do. That's a pretty Yeah that science does require courage, but sometimes courage can border on the scary. But that was awesome that it turned out all right? Isn't it right? Isn't it great

that it turned out all right? And then he turned around and officially like presented his results drinking Jersey City. But in doing this and adopting this um, he actually cut the infant and child mortality rate in half over a thirty year period. Yeah, because of all the junk that was in their previous to that, not to mention making public swimming pools reality as well as all lifeguards saying, oh the pool, we have a f R incident. I think I think I could take a guess as to

what it means. But what is that stand for? Accidental fecal release. Yeah, you see how you brought that all through sixty Yeah. Uh, I'm glad that. Uh. I'm glad you were here to to walk me through all things poop and water related. That's generally, that's what's going to happen. When when when you ask a Julie Douglas on the show. Okay, well, uh but no, Julie, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. It was a lot of fun. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. I learned a lot.

This is great. Yeah. Maybe uh we'll have you back on soon so we can talk about some other kind of crazy technology. Yeah. Probably throwing a lot more science too, because that's that's your your stuff. They actually tell people where they can find you. Yeah, okay, check it out stuff to blow your mind dot com. Um, we we cover pretty much everything under this fun and we have some videos out there so you can check out on the website. Yeah, some great one like the elevator one. Yeah,

we might be bringing that back. All right. Well, guys, if you have any suggestion for future episode of tech Stuff, whether it's a topic or a guest I should have on maybe the interview I should do. Let me know, send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on

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