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Heavy water tastes sweet!

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member

exchemist

Veteran Member

I would really suggest that you watch the video.

The peer reviewed article:

Sweet taste of heavy water

And a popular magazine article on it:

Heavy Water Has Sweet Taste, New Study Confirms | Biology, Chemistry | Sci-News.com

Phil Mason, aka Thunderf00t, is a popular YouTuber. He posts science videos and debunks bogus science. He is also a full-time scientist. At the lab he works at someone asked the crazy question "What does heavy water taste like?"
From looking at the article it seems this is attributed to the proteins in the human taste receptor being slightly more rigid and compact in D2O than in H2O.

It is all traced back to the effect by which hydrogen bonding in D2O is a bit stronger than in H2O, which in turn is due to the lower zero point energy of the H-bond, as a result of its lower vibrational frequency, because of the greater mass of the D atom.

So there we are: a zero point energy effect! That should bring the forum woomeisters out of the woodwork.:D
 

Aupmanyav

Be your own guru
Ah! Why did not Allah / God made all water as D20 or D30? Moreover, we would have been spared of the effort to manufacture it. I think India is low on production of Heavy Water.
 
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Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
From looking at the article it seems this is attributed to the proteins in the human taste receptor being slightly more rigid and compact in D2O than in H2O.

It is all traced back to the effect by which hydrogen bonding in D2O is a bit stronger than in H2O, which in turn is due to the lower zero point energy of the H-bond, as a result of its lower vibrational frequency, because of the greater mass of the D atom.

So there we are: a zero point energy effect! That should bring the forum woomeisters out of the woodwork.:D
Yes, you are not tasting quantum effects as much with the heavy water. Mason had fun with that in his video since he often refutes peddlers of quantum mechanics woo woo.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
That's an amusing way of looking at it, certainly.
The video is a good one of his. He goes over how the question arose, how they tested it at his lab and how he pinned down that the "sweetness" was roughly that of a one percent sugar solution. At one point they realized that this was a topic that should be treated more seriously. He found experts in the field that were willing to test and he gives them the majority of the credit for the paper. He said his only contribution to the actual paper was that he did the highly technical distillation of water required for it. He would have to blow the glass for the distillation for each vile that he would distill. That part of the project alone took a month of his time.

The reason that they distilled the already highly purified samples was that they knew the first criticism wielded against them would be that the water was "dirty". I posted the YouTube video first since that is what led to his experimentation. I then linked the technical paper since that is the best evidence for the phenomenon and lastly the popular paper.
 
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