Acid for blood

[cmdr_zoom]

A lot of people, especially those who've never taken chemistry, don't realize that water is a solvent - the purer, the better. A little water and a bit of mechanical action (ie, scrubbing) will quickly dissolve most organic compounds. And on this planet, it fills vast oceans and falls from the sky! If we weren't already made out of it (and stuff dissolved in it), it would be pretty terrifying. Even so, drinking distilled water can make you sick, as it rips stuff you need right out of you.

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

For my money, the most awesomely weird thing about water is that it's denser in the liquid phase than it is as a solid. That is baller strange behavior for matter. Only a handful of chemicals will float as solids in their own liquid phase (including, of all things, plutonium) - and yet if water, probably the most abundant chemical compound in the universe, didn't do that, a lot of important stuff wouldn't happen. (The development of complex life on Earth, for instance. If bodies of water froze from the bottom up, odds are the Earth would have frozen solid in the first big Ice Age and never thawed out again.)

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

Be all that is may, it still does not excuse Signs.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

There is no excuse for Signs.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Look up "hydric acid" some time. :)

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Heh. Just so.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

My favorite "oh holy crap" moment in high school chemistry - what am I saying, there was only the one - was realizing while we were talking about acids and bases that water is both. Its chemical formula could be, and in some ways really should be, written HOH.

H, hydrogen - lots of familiar acids start with H (HCl, HF, H₂SO₄)...

... OH, hydroxide, as in nastily alkaline compounds like NaOH (lye).

pH 7, baby! Now that's a universal solvent.