Thin Water Acts Like a Solid 138
Roland Piquepaille writes "What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid. "The confined water film behaves like a solid in the vertical direction by forming layers parallel to the confining surface, while maintaining it's liquidity in the horizontal direction where it can flow out," said one of the researchers. "Water is a wonderful lubricant, but it flows too easily for many applications. At the one nanometer scale, water is a viscous fluid and could be a much better lubricant," added another one."
Nanoscale Fluidic Logic (Score:1, Interesting)
But what is the channel made of? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ripley's Believe It or Not Ball (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But what is the channel made of? (Score:5, Interesting)
The phenomenon is well understood in the hydrophobic case, both experimentally and in simulations. This experiment is new, up till now they couldn't get down to such small separations, but they are overstating the case when they claim that this is a complete surprise... as another poster said, many many simulation studies have suggested a structuring of water near hydrophilic surfaces.
Another neat thing happens when you have one wall hydrophobic and one wall hydrophilic. This has been dubbed a "Janus interface" after the two-faced Roman god, and there's a lot of interest in them.
Re:the actual reference... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course this higher-viscosity persists only over a very short-range, but understanding these "nano-mechanical" properties is crucial for the design and construction of future nano-scale devices.
Duh, Roland (Score:4, Interesting)
I started typing this and thought to myself, "Something about the way that submission is written and how it misses the point of the article smells of Roland Piquepaille."
I wasn't at all surprised when I went back and checked the author to see his name and standard question-link-quote writing format.
Now I'm curious because the pressure they apply seems to be of interest here. I'm curious if 3 dimensional order appears under high isotropic pressures. If so, I'd expect this to be possible in larger volumes with sufficient pressure, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the viscosity increased, too.
Re:What happens when you learn (Score:2, Interesting)
My, mine, your, yours, his, hers, theirs, our, and ours come to mind. None of the posessive pronouns take an apostrophe.
completely random science fiction reference (Score:3, Interesting)
Grew up on his science fiction and fact books; "The Promise of Space" was seminal to my interest in space. Unfortunately his (alleged) personal discretions have cast a serious shadow over his legacy.
Re:Idiots, water lubricants are great! (Score:3, Interesting)
enjoy!