Human Taste Buds Can Tell the Difference Between Normal and 'Heavy' Water, Study Finds (sciencealert.com) 104
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: [T]here's been a longstanding question over whether heavy water tastes the same as regular drinking water -- or whether its subtle isotopic variation yields a different taste that people may be able to perceive. "There is anecdotal evidence from the 1930s that the taste of pure D2O is distinct from the neutral one of pure H2O, being described mostly as 'sweet,'" an international team of researchers led by first authors and biochemists Natalie Ben Abu and Philip E. Mason explains in a new study. [I]n their new research, Ben Abu, Mason, and their team can finally confirm that there really is something a bit different about the taste of heavy water. "Despite the fact that the two isotopes are nominally chemically identical, we have shown conclusively that humans can distinguish by taste (which is based on chemical sensing) between H2O and D2O, with the latter having a distinct sweet taste," explains senior author and physical chemist Pavel Jungwirth from the Czech Academy of Sciences.
In a taste-testing experiment with 28 participants, most people were able to distinguish between H2O and D2O, and tests with mixed amounts of the waters revealed that greater proportions of heavy water were perceived as tasting sweeter. In tests with mice, however, the animals did not seem to prefer drinking heavy water over regular water, although they did show a preference for sugared water -- suggesting that in mice, D2O does not elicit the same sweet taste that people can perceive. Other taste tests conducted by the team suggest why this is so, indicating that human taste receptivity to D2O is mediated by the taste receptor TAS1R2/TAS1R3, which is known to respond to sweetness in both natural sugars and artificial sweeteners. Experiments in the lab with HEK 293 cells confirmed the same thing, showing robust responses in TAS1R2/TAS1R3 expressing cells when exposed to D2O. The findings are published in the journal Communications Biology.
In a taste-testing experiment with 28 participants, most people were able to distinguish between H2O and D2O, and tests with mixed amounts of the waters revealed that greater proportions of heavy water were perceived as tasting sweeter. In tests with mice, however, the animals did not seem to prefer drinking heavy water over regular water, although they did show a preference for sugared water -- suggesting that in mice, D2O does not elicit the same sweet taste that people can perceive. Other taste tests conducted by the team suggest why this is so, indicating that human taste receptivity to D2O is mediated by the taste receptor TAS1R2/TAS1R3, which is known to respond to sweetness in both natural sugars and artificial sweeteners. Experiments in the lab with HEK 293 cells confirmed the same thing, showing robust responses in TAS1R2/TAS1R3 expressing cells when exposed to D2O. The findings are published in the journal Communications Biology.
Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Video By Paper's Author (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's 43 minutes but worth it if you like well-presented details of science experiments and concepts.
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Because he's one of the authors? Thunderf00t can be a bit of a dick sometimes and I think he spends too much time on Musk but he is a real scientist and not just some loud mouth on YouTube.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
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The following week: Tide pods, the delicacy chosen en masse by the American youth.
Great with Netflix, great at ball game and a school snack favorite.
New flavors and enticing colors in the store near you!
Chase it down with a windex-colored 64 fl oz sugar bomb from the gas station nearby!
Who knew these colors could give your kid such fine taste bud sensation?!
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Just like when my ice cubes acquire a slight hint of last night's casserole from the leftovers in the freezer. Yum!
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago, I bought 20 ml of D2O on eBay and gave it to my daughter as a Christmas present.
We had fun making ice cubes that sink.
But we also tasted a few drops. It definitely has a sweet taste.
Another cool trick is to wet your finger with D2O and then touch a normal H2O ice cube. The D2O has a higher freezing temperature so it will immediately solidify and latch your finger onto the ice cube.
There are YouTube videos of other stuff you can do with heavy water. Great for an afternoon of quality father-daughter time ... assuming, of course, that she inherited your nerd gene. The next year, I gave her 100 grams of gallium.
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Great for an afternoon of quality father-daughter time ... assuming, of course, that she inherited your nerd gene. The next year, I gave her 100 grams of gallium.
Very nice! Thanks for some great ideas. D2O might not be available here, might raise more questions. I hope I can get hold of some of that gallium here.
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There's a YouTube channel called Cody's Lab which has some videos about home manufacture of heavy water. (I suspect it's mainly DOH rather than D2O, but it's a long time since I watched the videos).
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXHVqId0MQc
But he also purchases some heavy oxygen water (_quite_ a bit more expensive!) and tastes that as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH46r9Fvla4
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
D2O might not be available here, might raise more questions. I hope I can get hold of some of that gallium here.
Where do you live? I got both from eBay. Most sellers will ship worldwide.
I also bought some metallic sodium for my son. It is soft enough to cut with a butter knife. So we sliced off a chunk and tossed it into a bottle of water, and tried to capture the resulting hydrogen in a balloon. Unfortunately, the sputtering sodium ignited the hydrogen, the balloon exploded, and the liquid sprayed out. We were wearing eye protection but still got some lye burns on our forearms.
The pain helped with the male bonding.
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Yeah, metallic sodium and water aren't good friends. There's some pretty awesome videos of sodium metal being dropped into bodies of water. It's not what I'd deem an efficient means of producing hydrogen.
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That's awesome, and a really great idea of something to do with your kids.
I tasted some heavy water ~30 years ago, and I remember very specifically that 1) it definitely tasted different, and 2) it seemed sweet. It seems strange that it would take so long for a paper to be written about the topic.
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The best source of heavy water is United Nuclear [unitednuclear.com]. If you just want a taste 10 mL for $15 should suffice. If you are in to ice cube experiments and demos, then 100 mL for $90 might be better.
I have an element collection and have two vials with a short piece of polystyrene rod in light water, and heavy water. Polystyrene has a density of 1.05, half way between light and heavy water.
BTW - don't bother with trying to make heavy water at home. Even the simplest approach takes a considerable investment of effort
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I absolutely love this concept and will be buying some.
For those who may be as confused as I was:
1. D2O is evidently sold by weight, not by volume. $15 buys 10 grams, not 10 millilitres.
2. 100g of D2O is only about 60ml, or about 1/4 US cup (~4 tablespoons). So $15 would only get you 6ml, or less than half a tablespoon.
3. United Nuclear might have better quality control, but 1000g (~1 imperial pint / 1.25 US pints) costs $725.00, and the same weight can be purchased on eBay for $500.
4. There are currently
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Plus, I like ice cubes that sink. No frozen lip ptoblem.
Not surprising and not chemically identical (Score:5, Insightful)
Claims of "chemically identical" are ignorant nonsense, no chemist would say that. Chemistry of things dissolved in heavy water is different, some biological reactions or slowed or don't happen at all. If 25 percent of the water in your body were replaced you'd become sterile and cell division would slow down, your ability to heal or grow new tissue would be hampered. Increasing your body's concentration to 50 percent heavy water would kill you.
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If 25 percent of the water in your body were replaced you'd become sterile and cell division would slow down
So what you are saying is, as far as drinking water is concerned, Deuterium is the new Fluoride!
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One tenth percent heavy water would do nothing to you, one tenth percent fluoride water however...
Re: Not surprising and not chemically identical (Score:2)
Well, one tenth percent of salt ...
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your kidneys could handle a glass of water of that concentration of table salt, whereas the stuff added to water by cities but in that concentration would kill you. Hilarious in this century the allowed amount of flouration of water halved because the dose they were giving the populace turned out to be very close to the dose that would damage bones... truth is plenty of european countries have better teeth health and no fluoridation of water, but we keep adding this poison. It's not needed, there are smar
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absolutely false and ignorant. The former concentration cities were using went as high as 4 mg per liter, and could push young children into the danger range, even to weakening bones.
-- from Reuters, January 7 2011
The EPA did a risk-assessment study on whether some children may now get too much fluoride.
The study concluded that some children under the age of 8 may be overexposed to fluoride at least occasionally because of their high fluid intake compared to their body weight or because of high natural lev
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the new limit is 0.7 mg / liter by the way.
Zero need for it, smarter ways to protect teeth and Europe doing superior job without flouridating water. No need for this poison in our water.
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It would do nothing 'noticeable' to you.
It will almost certainly impede something somewhere inside of you.
Interestingly, I did read in a journal somewhere that tests between D2O and H2O resulted in fewer errors when DNA is copied. You still don't want to be drinking any amount of the stuff, though.
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but you do drink a certain amount of the stuff, 0.02 percent of your water to be exact.
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You mean I didn't have to pay for that vasectomy, and wouldn't have to worry as much about being overweight? Why didn't you say so earlier? I predict a new market for D2O, replacing the current alkaline water fad.
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Except you would be poisoned; cell division brought to halt (spindle apparatus can't function), enzymes stopping working... you'd be dead in about a week if experiments with small mammals any indication.
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The claim probably comes from the simplified way isotopes are defined for K-12 students. It's mostly true, but isotopes of hydrogen are a big outlier due to the huge difference in atomic mass between hydrogen and deuterium.
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Anyone curious will enjoy a deep dive into this. It's still hydrogen and water, but if I remember right the bond angle is different and there's an interesting story about why.
That in turn makes differences that matter a lot in biology.
Re:Not surprising and not chemically identical (Score:5, Informative)
The main difference is the chemical energy to break the bond, as the zero-point vibrational energy is different.
Basically when you have two atoms bound together, there is a minimum vibrational energy they can have, due to the way the quantum mechanics works out. Deuterium being heavier than Hydrogen has a lower minimum energy, and so the bond is harder to break than a normal H-O bond, as it starts from a lower energy level.
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Re:Not surprising and not chemically identical (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact chemists give Deuterium a different letter, D rather than H, gives you a hint they consider it to behave differently. C12 and C13 don't get different letters, they get a superscript instead.
Since the only difference is their weight, it only really matters for H. He doesn't really do any interesting chemistry it doesn't get it's own letter for different isotopes like H does.
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The fact chemists give Deuterium a different letter, D rather than H, gives you a hint they consider it to behave differently. C12 and C13 don't get different letters, they get a superscript instead.
Since the only difference is their weight, it only really matters for H. He doesn't really do any interesting chemistry it doesn't get it's own letter for different isotopes like H does.
Chemists do use superscripts to denote the different hydrogens (imagine the numbers are superscripted): 1H for hydrogen, 2H for deuterium, 3H for tritium. We use the shorthand H, D, and T because we can. There is no equivalent short name for 12C, 13C, and 14C, so we have to use the superscripted designations.
The behavior of an isotope has nothing to do with how we represent it in a formula - that is specified in the IUPAC naming conventions/rules.
Helium does have isotopic forms and are designated in th
Re: Not surprising and not chemically identical (Score:2)
The reason behind the use of the different letters is their different chemical behaviour though. You use D often enough it would be a pain to write H^2 every time. When you are buying deuterated NNR solvent, or writing H/D solvent exchange mechanisms, it's simply easier to use D rather than H^2. If other isotopes were used as commonly, they would have developed their own additional letter code!
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The reason behind the use of the different letters is their different chemical behaviour though. You use D often enough it would be a pain to write H^2 every time. When you are buying deuterated NNR solvent, or writing H/D solvent exchange mechanisms, it's simply easier to use D rather than H^2. If other isotopes were used as commonly, they would have developed their own additional letter code!
True but misleading. As someone who made his living for many years synthesizing compounds labeled with 2H and 3H and 12C and 14C, I would have used a shorthand for the carbon isotopes, but there are none. It is just a historical oddity that 2H and 3H ended up with trivial names.
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Not a rounding error in the case of heavy water. The point is that hydrogen bonding strength so very important to biology especially enzymes and spindle apparatus for cell division the difference is massive, reactions don't happen or rate are dramatically slowed. No competent chemist/biochemist is going to claim heavy water identical to water.
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The Ultimate Expensive Bottled Water! (Score:3)
There we go. Heavy water, the ultimate in pricey bottled water.
Move over, Perrier. This one's got kick!
It's neat that we can taste the difference, and if bottled water suppliers can mass produce it as a beverage it will surely reduce the operating costs of some types of nuclear reactors.
Re:The Ultimate Expensive Bottled Water! (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus we get to remove the genes that drive people to buy designer water from the gene pool! Big WIN!
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...water from the gene pool
All the chlorine in the world ain't gonna help that water.
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There we go. Heavy water, the ultimate in pricey bottled water.
Move over, Perrier. This one's got kick!
You should try heavy oxygen water. It costs several times more!
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Once again, Hogan’s Heroes was ahead of its time.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]
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Ashamed to admit that is the first thing I thought of when I read the headline.
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Don’t be ashamed - wear it proudly.
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Re: The Ultimate Expensive Bottled Water! (Score:3)
Perrier got nothing on gold-flake-"flavored" thick vitamin water "with real diamonds".
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It's neat that we can taste the difference, and if bottled water suppliers can mass produce it as a beverage it will surely reduce the operating costs of some types of nuclear reactors.
Not the kind we want though. Heavy water moderation has two advantages, you can use natural uranium instead of LEU and it makes more Pu. Neither of these are really an advantage these days though. LEU is very cheap and making Pu is problematic unless you are making weapons.
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If it catches on, we'll certainly have bottles labeled heavy water...
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Fukushima just has 1.5l of superheavy water left that they want to get rid of....
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Taste the rainbow! (Score:1)
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Spicy water!
28 participants (Score:1)
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You really don't have a firm grasp of this whole "science" thing, do you?
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Maybe you can enlighten me then. I want to determine if a human's taste buds can tell D2O from H2O. I find 28 people, and sure enough at least a few of them can reliably, in double blind tests, tell the difference.
Now, since you're a real scientist maybe you can explain to me how I haven't proved that they can do so? And how, apparently, I need a larger trial of say 10000 people? Good luck getting that funding.
Re: 28 participants (Score:2)
That's OK. Since I have less than 28 people with me to read your comment in a double-blind study, and it hasn't been peer-reviewed, it doesn't exist.
Actually, it (Score:1)
tastes like spherical chickens
What about slightly heavy water (Score:5, Funny)
How does slightly heavy water taste?
Also known as Deuterium Hydroxide.
Apparently invented by Homer Simpson, at Montgomery Burns nuclear facility.
DOH
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Good one though...
surprising - (Score:5, Funny)
People I know have no discrimination in their taste of water.
Our tap water is awful and many people in my city will agree. But then many will buy a brand of bottled water that is nearly as bad. My preference is distilled water which for me has an exciting 'electric' taste. Unfortunately I've cracked some ribs and need some 'dirty' water with minerals at least some of the time. There is another brand of bottled water locally that tastes much like distilled water, but it is not a big seller. People just can't tell the difference! I've tried water from big impressive filtration systems and it's good, but inconvenient and expensive. So now I use a Zero filter at home for very pure water. Yum.
I'm also mystified by the popularity of Starbucks and similar coffee. It's terrible! I suppose the kids tolerate it because it is filled with sugar and candy like ingredients. How would they know what the actual coffee tastes like? So I'm a bit suspicious of a 'scientific' study that claims people can distinguish a subtle taste difference. It must be a major difference, and that sweetness sounds really creepy to me.
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Bottled water tastes of bottle. Unless it is in a glass bottle, but then it is usually San Pellegrino. Funnily enough, San Pellegrino's horrible taste overpowers any container it might be in, so it is a mystery why they like to use glass bottles.
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Distilled water is bitter. Can only stand it in a tea.
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Not all distilled water is equal. Check the TDS levels for one. It may not be as pure as you think. Even with very low TDS, I tried some distilled water from one brand, and it tasted like plastic. From another brand, it tasted great.
It also depends on which solids are dissolved in it.
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I'm also mystified by the popularity of Starbucks and similar coffee. It's terrible!
You are absolutely right. Starbucks tried to make inroads in Switzerland, using their standard US-style brewed coffee. Horrible stuff - just like standard coffee in nearly all US restaurants is horrible. They had to give in and buy decent coffee machines here, just to bring themselves to the same standard as every other coffee shop in the country, but at twice the price.
Their (few) branches here stay in business for two reasons: (a) the sugary drinks they sell, and (b) they have comfortable furniture, so
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Here in Spain the few branches I've seen seem to survive on tourists and American students.
Go for spring water, not "drinking water" (Score:3)
Instead, go for a bottle labeled as "spring water" and you'll find that it's usually more local brands from local sources - wells or capped springs - and minimally processed. And it has the trace elements in it naturally. Most of the smaller brands of spring water ar
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Water that's too pure tastes funny because it lacks minerals.
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We used distilled water in our kid’s brand new vaporizer for the same reason, but then it didn’t work. No vapor at all, even though it’s clearly on. Come to find out, there’s a section in the instructions for how much salt to dump in the water if you aren’t seeing it do anything, since it apparently requires minerals in the water to help conduct the current. Sure enough, a few pinches of salt later and the thing worked fine.
I suspect it’d have worked mostly fine after a f
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Btw, not all distilled water is equal. Some taste like plastic, and the other one I had tasted just like a decent bottled water, nothing really special, just a nice 'nothing' taste.
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I've found the AquaHydrate water is rather delicious, you might like to try it out.
So will dehydrated D2O (Score:2)
be the next artificial sweetener?
Re: So will dehydrated D2O (Score:2)
Sure, but you can only buy it when new year's eve falls on the 2nd of January.
I'd rather try some pure H and O plasma, harvested from the sun. But to land there, you need to go at night!
Extraordinary claims (Score:1)
I need more proof, maybe contaminant in the heavy water caused it? Who knows?
Would like multiple independent studies and spectrographic analysis of the water.
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Read the study. It pre-empts your complaints. In fact in the video about how they made the water, they specifically state that they did it to counter pedantic people who would complain about it. They literally distilled water in a specially sealed container tubes which had to be created for each batch of water and then tossed to ensure no contaminants after end product was extracted.
Other ingredients? (Score:2)
I hope they tested with pure water. And didn't overlook that there might be minerals in the H2O, or stuff (like helper chemicals) from making D2O in that.
I don't have time to read the study. So if anyone read it...?
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Good thing we have you to think about these things, these researchers probably never thought of that.
Wilson Tucker's The Time Masters (Score:2)
Is there some advantage to drinking it? (Score:2)
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Probably not, but that won't stop hucksters from selling it as a miracle cure, weight-loss and sleep aid!
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Likely not. Some things in nature happen due to an accidental "misfiring." A classic case is why flying insects swarm to an artificial light source at night. They evolved over millions of years with the moon as the only light source at night. Since the moon is so far away, flying around doesn't change its position relative to you, so you can still fly in a straight line, so it's reasonable to navigate by it. Flying insects are h
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Sweetness is something we seek out because there is an evolutionary advantage to consuming sugars. Does heavy water taste sweet because there is some benefit to drinking it, or is it a toxic coincidence like lead acetate?
If you read the article, drinking too much can cause infertility and / or death.
Nuko-Cola Free (Score:2)
Next, let's chug a glass of H2O and H2O2! (Score:1)
Next, let's chug a glass of H2O and H2O2! Will that extra molecule of oxygen create a cleaner, more refreshing taste?
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