
As an aqueous inorganic chemist by training (at least in grad school, although my horizons have expanded quite a bit due to my time in industry), I’ve spent a fair amount of time investigating and understanding the role of water in chemical reactions. When working with transition metals, this usually translates into accounting for aqueous coordination complexes, pH, and solvent effects. However, after perusing the Net these last few years, I now realize I have been woefully ignorant concerning the chemistry of water. I knew water tends to form loose clusters of molecules (due to hydrogen bonding), which accounts for some of its unusual properties, but I wasn’t aware of the immense importance of these clusters to its chemistry.I am particularly upset that neither my professors nor my chemistry textbooks felt it necessary to cover this important aspect of aqueous chemistry. As a result, I’ve been forced to learn about clustered water on my own by visiting some rather arcane web sites – web sites that for some reason appear to contain a high percentage of viruses, bots, and other spyware. To make it even worse, most of the my information comes from sites which make a profit by selling devices or elixirs based on the unique properties of these water clusters, which means that the scientific basis for these properties are often poorly explained. (These people really need some spell checkers!)
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