Water is quite beautiful to look at,

and I guess you probably all know that you're two-thirds water --

you do, don't you? Right.

But you may not know that because the water molecule is so small,

that two-thirds translates into 99% of your molecules.

Think of it, 99% percent of your molecules are water.

So, your shoes are carrying around a blob of water essentially.

Now, the question is, in your cells,

do those water molecules actually do something?

Are these molecules essentially jobless

or do they do something that might be really, really interesting?

For that matter are we even really sure that water is H₂O?

We read about that in the textbook,

but is it possible that some water is actually not H₂O?

So, these are questions whose answers are actually not as simple

as you think they might be.

In fact, we're really in the dark about water, we know so little.

And why do we know so little?

Well, you probably think that water is so pervasive,

and it's such a simple molecule,

that everything ought to be known about water, right?

I mean you'd think it's all there.

Well, scientists think the same.

Many scientists think, och, water it's so simple,

that everything must be known.

And, in fact, that's not at all the case.

So, let me show you, to start with, a few examples of things about water

that we ought to know, but we really haven't a clue.

Here's something that you see every day.

You see a cloud in the sky and, probably, you haven't asked the question:

How does the water get there?

Why, I mean, there's only one cloud sitting there,

and the water is evaporating everywhere,

why does it go to this cloud forming what you see there?

So, another question: Could you imagine droplets floating on water?

We expect droplets to coalesce instantly with the water.

The droplets persist for a long time.

And here's another example of walking on water.

This is a lizard from Central America.

And because it walks on water it's called the Jesus Christ lizard.

At first you'll say, "Well, I know the answer to this,

the surface tension is high in water."

But the common idea of surface tension

is that there's a single molecular layer of water at the top,

and this single molecular layer is sufficient to create enough tension

to hold whatever you put there.

I think this is an example that doesn't fit that.

And here's another example.

Two beakers of water. You put two electrodes in,

and you put high voltage between them and then what happens is a bridge forms,

and this bridge is made of water, a bridge of water.

And this bridge can be sustained

as you move one beaker away from the other beaker,

as much as 4 centimeters,

sustained essentially indefinitely.

How come we don't understand this?

So, what I mean is that there are lots of things about water

that we should understand, but we don't understand,

we really don't know.

So, okay, so what do we know about water?

Well, you've learned that the water molecule

contains an oxygen and two hydrogens.

That you learn in the textbooks. We know that.

We also know there are many water molecules,

and these water molecules are actually moving around microscopically.

So, we know that. What don't we know about water?

Well, we don't know anything about the social behavior of water.

What do I mean by social? Well, say, sitting at the bar

and chatting with your neighbor.

We don't know how water molecules actually share information or interact,

and also we don't know about the actual movements of water molecules.

How water molecules interact with one another,

and also how water molecules interact with other molecules

like that purple one sitting there. Unknown.

Also the phases of water.

We've all learned that there's a solid phase,

a liquid phase and a vapor phase.

However, a hundred years ago,

there was some idea that there might be a fourth phase,

somewhere in between a solid and a liquid.

Sir William Hardy, a famous physical chemist,

a hundred years ago exactly,

professed that there was actually a fourth phase of water,

and this water was kind of more ordered than other kinds of water,

and in fact had a gel-like consistency.

So, the question arose to us --

you know, all of this was forgotten, because people began, as methods improved,

to begin to study molecules instead of ensembles of molecules,

and people forgot about the collectivity of water molecules

and began looking, the same as in biology,

began looking at individual molecules and lost sight of the collection.

So, we thought we're going to look at this

because we had some idea that it's possible

that this missing link, this fourth phase,

might actually be the missing link

so that we can understand the phenomena regarding water that we don't understand.

So, we started by looking somewhere between a solid and a liquid.

And the first experiments that we did get us going.

We took a gel, that's the solid, and we put it next to water.

And we added some particles to the water

because we had the sense that particles would show us something.

And you can see what happened

is that the particles began moving away from the interface

between the gel and the water,

and they just kept moving and moving and moving.

And they wound up stopping at a distance

that's roughly the size of one of your hairs.

Now, that may seem small, but by molecular dimensions

that's practically infinite. It's a huge dimension.

So, we began studying the properties of this zone,

and we called it, for obvious reasons, the exclusion zone,

because practically everything you put there would get excluded,

would get expelled from the zone as it builds up,

or instead of exclusion zone, EZ for short.

And so we found that the kinds of materials

that would create or nucleate this kind of zone,

not just gels, but we found that practically every water-loving,

or so-called hydrophilic surface could do exactly that,

creating the EZ water.

And as the EZ water builds, it would expel all the solutes

or particles, whatever into the bulk water.

We began learning about properties, and we've spent now quite a few years

looking at the properties.

And it looks something like this:

You have a material next to water and these sheets of EZ layers begin to build,

and they build and build and they just keep building up one by one.

So, if you look at the structure of each one of these planes,

you can see that it's a honeycomb, hexagonal kind of structure,

a bit like ice, but not ice.

And, if you look at it carefully, you can see the molecular structures.

So, of course, it consists of hydrogen and oxygen,

because it's built from water.

But, actually, they're not water molecules.

If you start counting the number of hydrogens

and the number of oxygens,

it turns out that it's not H₂O.

It's actually H₃O₂.

So, it is possible that there's water that's not H₂O, a phase of water.

So, we began looking, of course, more into these extremely interesting properties.

And what we found is, if we stuck electrodes into the EZ water,

because we thought there might be some electrical potential,

it turned out that there's lots of negative charge in that zone.

And we used some dyes to seek positive charge,

and we found that in the bulk water zone there was an equal amount of positivity.

So, what's going on?

It looked like, that next to these interfaces

the water molecule was somehow splitting up

into a negative part and a positive part.

And the negative part sat right next to the water-loving material.

Positive charges went out beyond that.

We found it's the same, you didn't need a straight interface,

you could also have a sphere.

So, you put a sphere in the water, and any sphere that's suspended in the water

develops one of these exclusion zones, EZ's, around it, with the negative charge,

beyond that is all the positive charge. Charge separation.

It didn't have to be only a material sphere, in fact,

you could put a droplet in there, a water droplet,

or, in fact, even a bubble, you'd get the same result.

Surrounding each one of these entities is a negative charge

and the separated positive charge.

So, here's a question for you.

If you take two of these negatively charged entities,

and you drop them in a beaker of water near each other,

what happens to the distance between them?

I bet that 95% of you would say:

Well, that's easy, I learned in physics, negative and negative repel each other,

so, therefore they're going to go apart from one another, right?

That what you'd guess?

Well, the actual result if you think about it,

is that it's not only the negative charge but you also have positive charge.

And the positive charge is especially concentrated

in between those two spheres,

because they come from contributions from both of those spheres.

So, there are a lot of them there.

When you have positive in between two negatives

what happens is that you get an attractive force.

And so you expect these two spheres to actually come together

despite the fact that they have the same charge,

and that's exactly what happens.

It's been known for for many years.

They come together, and if you have many of them, instead of just two of them,

you'll get something that looks like this.

They'll come together and this is called a colloid crystal.

It's a stable structure.

In fact, the yogurt that you might have had this morning

probably consists of what you see right here.

So, they come together because of the opposite charge.

The same thing is true if you have droplets.

They come together because of the opposing charges.

So, when you think of droplets, and aerosol droplets in the air,

and think about the cloud,

it's actually the reason that these aerosol droplets come together

is because of this opposite charge.

So, the droplets from the air, similarly charged,

come together coalesce, giving you that cloud in the sky.

So the fourth phase, or EZ phase, actually explains quite a lot.

It explains, for example, the cloud.

It's the positive charge

that draws these negatively charged EZ shells together

to give you a condensed cloud that you see up in the sky.

In terms of the water droplets,

the reason that these are sustained on the surface

for actually sometimes as long as tens of seconds --

and you can see it if you're in a boat

and it's raining, you can sometimes see this on the surface of the lake,

these droplets are sustained for some time --

and the reason they're sustained is that each droplet contains this shell,

this EZ shell, and the shell has to be breached

in order for the water to coalesce with the water beneath.

Now, in terms of the Jesus Christ lizard, the reason the lizard can walk,

it's not because of one single molecular layer,

but there are many EZ layers lining the surface,

and these are gel-like, they're stiffer than ordinary surfaces

so, therefore, you can float a coin on the surface of the water,

you can float a paperclip,

although if put it beneath the surface it sinks right down to the bottom.

it's because of that.

And in terms of the water bridge,

If you think of it as plain old, liquid, bulk water -- hard to understand.

But if you think of it as EZ water and a gel-like character,

then you can understand how it could be sustained with almost no droop,

a very stiff structure.

Okay, so, all well and good, but why is this useful for us?

What can we do with it?

Well, we can get energy from water.