Lifeboat Foundation

A team of scientists has uncovered new molecular properties of water—a discovery of a phenomenon that had previously gone unnoticed.

Liquid water is known to be an excellent transporter of its own autoionization products; that is, the charged species obtained when a water molecule (H₂O) is split into protons (H^{+) and hydroxide ions (OH−). This remarkable property of water makes it a critical component in emerging electrochemical energy production and storage technologies such as fuel cells; indeed, life itself would not be possible if water did not possess this characteristic.}

Water is known to consist an intricate network of weak, directional interactions known as hydrogen bonds. For nearly a century, it was thought that the mechanisms by which water transports the H⁺ and OH⁻ ions were mirror images of each other – identical in all ways except for directions of the hydrogen bonds involved in the process.