1/13/2023 0 Comments Pdfinfo water chemistry![]() Not sure why ScienceDaily picked it up either. I am, however, saying that it's not nearly interesting enough to be on the front page of Slashdot. Now I'm not saying that Kumar et al's paper is not an important contribution to the field of theoretical water chemistry. Trust me, I've seen first-hand how some ancient Academy members use this policy to publish some serious garbage in that journal. ![]() This journal has an interesting quirk in that if you're a member of the Academy, you get to choose who referees your paper. Fourth, and perhaps most telling, is that this study is published in PNAS. Third, if you read the last few paragraphs (if you can make it that far), you'll see that a referee brought to the authors' attention that the work presented in their paper had essentially already been done about 15 years ago. Second, you'll notice that the paper doesn't mention anything about agriculture or cancer (or much in between), but instead seems to focus on topics as vital to our way of life as orientational entropy and the Widom temperature of water. Read: classical equations of motion with an empirically-derived force field (just to head off the quantum gibberish). First, it's an MD (molecular dynamics) simulation. You may notice a few things if you read it. Seriously, how did this get on the front page? I suppose it's an interesting article, to theoretical chemists, but that's about it. Even digital cryptanalysis and protein folding began to be tractable.īut it is only now, as cheap supercomputing capability is in the hands of individuals (in the forms of graphic processing units that became cheap commodities due to their utility for computer gaming), that we're starting to see breakthroughs in understanding the behavior of water. ![]() Then they were surpassed by more powerful supercomputers formed of networks of machines for parallelizable tasks. Weather prediction (pushing out near the newly-understood chaos limit of the input measurements). Brute-force correct solutions to video synthesis replacing cute tricks that dripped with artifacts. The utterly anti-intuitive science of aerodynamics. Then supercomputers came along and we started to get good solutions for a lot of stuff. Expectation was that really understanding water would occur late in the reduction of chemistry to something that could be (near-)fully modeled and predicted. Simple as it might seem, water is one of the most complex fluids, because of the long range order created by hydrogen bonds.īack in the '60s when I was taking chemistry there was much talk about how complex the behavior of water was, how major breakthroughs were needed to really understand it, how it affected so many other things in chemistry, how you have to understand not just the individual molecules but the interactions of many of them with each other and other molecules, yadda yadda. 'And if we understand this, we will not only have a new way of thinking about physics and biology but also a new way to approach health and disease.'" 'Understanding hydrophobicity, and how different conditions change it, is probably one of the most fundamental components in understanding how proteins fold in water and how different biomolecules remain stable in it,' says Kumar. It could also help understand how this changing network of bonds and ordering of local tetrahedrality between water molecules changes the nature of protein folding and degradation. "Understanding how individual water molecules maneuver in a system to form fleeting tetrahedral structures and how changing physical conditions such as temperatures and pressures affect the amount of disorder each imparts on that system may help scientists understand why certain substances, like drugs used in chemotherapy, are soluble in water and why some are not. ScienceDaily is reporting that several new discoveries about the simple molecule of water have kicked off a surge in research that scientists believe could lead to solving some of the world's most tricky problems from agriculture to cancer.
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