Yeah but that can be compressed, as **Jayrot ** pointed out, to water
Nothing other than “you’re not ingesting chemicals that have names…blah blah” This sounds like a pretty clever way of preserving meat without adding chemcials we don’t really need to be eating.
Sorry your majesty.
Maybe I’m just being, er, dense - but I couldn’t work out whether they were suggesting that the increased viscosity was due to the pressure exerted by the probe tip - or by the confinement to nano-scale layers
In other words - would water exhibit the same effect at larger scales at the same pressure, and confinement was the only practical method of getting to the pressure needed?
or was the pressure merely the means to achieve the nano-scale confinement?
And the day a man is not allowed to find lunchmeat funny is the day the terrorists win, dammit
I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to step on your toes. I see you like to make those sorts of posts. And I’m sure you’re right, when I have been here more than a month my knowledge of what is proper will change and I too will make jokes on your GQ threads. As noted above, “And the day a man is not allowed to find lunchmeat funny is the day the terrorists win, dammit”
Thanks for the info on compressing water.
And I notice that the process only works, so far, on meat that is otherwise preserved, i.e., it will not make things so sterile they needn’t be refrigerated. But it says they are working on a shelf-stable version. I think that’s a better plan than radiation, mainly because of the problem of disposing of radiation waste.
I believe they’re saying that very small thicknesses of water exhibit increased viscosity because the water molecules tend to organize in layers. The probe tip pressure doesn’t cause the viscosity increase, it measures the viscosity increase.
It’s not very clear, but I don’t think the researchers are “compressing” the water in the same sense as we’re talking about compressing water at 87,000psi. I think they’re making a very small channel of water by removing water molecules, not by squeezing them closer together.
“Radiation” does not necessarily imply radioactive materials, and it definitely does not imply that there will be any more radioactive material as a result of the process. You need neutrons to cause previously inert matter to become radioactive, and very few radiation sources produce neutrons. Meanwhile, all you need to sterilize food is high-energy x-rays, which can be produced without any radioactive material at all.
But I think your interpretation makes the most sense, on re-reading
I know science journos must have a hard time interpreting obscure research to make it readable for everyone - but that article seems to have applied Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to prose, the nearer it comes to saying something, the vaguer it gets
And it makes me wonder what happens when water (on a macro scale) is compressed to stupid levels - does it really stay liquid until presumably there’s atomic collapse to neutron star type stuff?
I thought there were some ice types that would form under extreme pressure.
87,000 psi is about 600 megapascals.
At that pressure, you’ll have a liquid down to about 0°c. Below that temperature, ice V starts to form.
I’d totally forgotten about all those different ices, thanks
(depressing how knowledge can evaporate, …and so it goes…)