Here's another one .. just to keep me honest about water's impacts on 'Habitability' and the prospects of life, here's some more interesting evidence in support of biological evolution seeming to be dependent, at a quantum level, on an unpredicted behaviour of water …
Physicists discover new quantum state of water
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Water's strange and life-giving qualities could be at least partly explained by quantum mechanics. That is the claim being made by a group of physicists in the UK and the US, who have made extremely sensitive measurements of the protons in tiny samples of water and have found that these protons behave very differently to those in much larger sample.
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According to Reiter, the quantum ground state that they have identified could be important to life because the confinement length typical of their experiments – about 2 nm – is roughly equal to the distances between structures within biological cells. "I think that the quantum mechanics of protons in water has been playing a role in the development of cellular life all along but we never noticed before," he says.
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Well .. maybe … but the interesting thing for me, is that we're still grappling to understand the molecule which (arguably) dominates the planet and us …
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But he cautions that not all of water's properties are necessarily explainable using quantum mechanics. In particular, he believes that the claim, made by several research groups, that supercooled water has distinct high- and low-density forms, is better explained using statistical mechanics than it is by considering the behaviour of individual particles.
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Interesting article.
Cheers