Water Really Isn’t H2O

Now this is cool:

Water isn’t H2O after all. On the timescale of molecular reactions, it is really H1.5O, reports Aris Chatzidimitriou-Dreismann, a physicist at the Technical University of Berlin. He got this puzzling result when he and a group of colleagues fired neutrons at water molecules to create a high-speed snapshot of their structure. The particles did not scatter as much as expected, indicating they were hitting an unexpectedly small number of hydrogen atoms. When the researchers studied other hydrogen-based materials, about one-third of the hydrogen atoms were missing there too. “It was and is a shock, but two completely different instruments using different interactions give the same results,” Chatzidimitriou-Dreismann says.

It seems as if on the molecular level, quantum physics has a role to play, which means that on the molecular level there is a very real quantum effect.

Very cool for those interested.