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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 28 2019, @06:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-H2O2-out-of-thin-air^W-water dept.

Water is everywhere on Earth, but maybe that just gives it more space to hide its secrets. Its latest surprise, Stanford researchers report Aug. 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that microscopic droplets of water spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide.

The discovery could pave the way for greener ways to produce the molecule, a common bleaching agent and disinfectant, said Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a professor of chemistry in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

"Water is one of the most commonly found materials, and it's been studied for years and years and you would think that there was nothing more to learn about this molecule. But here's yet another surprise," said Zare, who is also a member of Stanford Bio-X.

The discovery was made serendipitously while Zare and his lab were studying a new, more efficient way to create gold nanostructures in tiny water droplets known as microdroplets. To make those structures, the team added an additional molecule called a reducing agent. As a control test, Zare suggested seeing if they could create gold nanostructures without the reducing agent. Theoretically that should have been impossible, but it worked anyway—hinting at an as yet undiscovered feature of microdroplet chemistry.

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-chemists-microdroplets-spontaneously-hydrogen-peroxide.html

First astrology and now homeopathy are starting to make sense after all.

Jae Kyoo Lee el al., "Spontaneous generation of hydrogen peroxide from aqueous microdroplets", PNAS (2019). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1911883116


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  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday August 28 2019, @06:58AM (1 child)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Wednesday August 28 2019, @06:58AM (#886679)

    The team eventually traced those results to the presence of a molecule called hydroxyl—a single hydrogen atom paired with an oxygen atom — that can also act as a reducing agent.

    You may untwist your knickers now.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 28 2019, @07:06AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 28 2019, @07:06AM (#886683) Journal

    You may untwist your knickers now.

    Not completely yet. No energy considerations, not confirmed as 'it is the size that matter' (they did it by water atomization only, how about they do it in fog droplets?), etc.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford