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Pentawater [again]

gmol

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Feb 23, 2002
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Having lunch at my local Whole Foods recently, I saw a pentawater display that had footnoted many of their claims with studies, I am trying to lookup.

I am reasonably certain that they don't have some brilliant physical chemist working for them that is actually doing interesting work on water clusters..I am not a physicist, but I have solved a few protein structures, so I have a reasonably good feel for this kind of thing (I think)...

From their webpage: http://www.hydrateforlife.com/research.shtml


In an article published in the February 2003 issue of the Physics of Vibrations scientific journal, the findings of a study comparing Penta water to distilled, tap, and filtered water revealed that Penta water is made up of smaller clusters and an overall more homogenous cluster structure than other water. This study, titled Study of cluster molecular structures in various types of liquid water by using spontaneous Raman Spectroscopy, has been published in the peer-reviewed Physics of Vibration scientific journal, Volume 10 Number 2, 2002.
Click to expand...

Now it seems that they are saying that the same study has been published in 2002 and 2003, in the same paragraph.
Checking the Vol 10, Number 2, 2002 of the journal:

http://www.physwavephen.net/10-2-2002.htm

The article appears to indeed be there. And the following short summary *appears* to be sound:

http://www.bhrlab.com/articles/Study1.html

I apologize if this has already been discussed, but anyone (preferabbly someone who does a lot of Raman spectra (are those error bars accurate?)) want to comment?

Googling the first author (AF Bunkin), he appears to have published in some legit journals...
 
Well, I'll get in first. If they can find any way to tell Penta water from non-Penta water, Randi has a million bucks for them.... :)

Rolfe.
 
Um ... what are those numbers doing along the bottom (horizontal) axis of those two graphs?
Click to expand...

They seem to be arbitrary sample labels. Shame they don't match the number of points. And WHY ARE THE POINTS JOINED UP!? The points represent are separate samples. Joining them up is meaningless! I give them 2/10 for data presentation skills.

Having said that, I can't comment on the accuracy of the data. I'm still reading through some of the other stuff.
 
Did they use Penta water off the shelf for the test? Probably not, just like the homeopathic flourescence study recently published. This is a big red flag. The researcher should prepare all of the materials. Finally, why bother doing this at all if PW has no effects on human health whatsoever? Typical CAM thinking, there is some minute, barely measurable thingie, therefore PW works. No stupid, a simple test of PW would completely disprove it. They avoid this at all costs. Why? Hmmmmmm...
 
Not enough time to review the article right now... but, is there a statement somewhere in there about who funded the study? Just curious.

-TT
 
Ok, I've read a bit further and here's what I've found so far.

The Russians seem to be genuine. Without reading their paper I can't make a judgement. Unfortunately, Physics of Vibrations is not a journal I have access to.

I followed the trail back to Penta water. They link to the Bio-Hydration Research Lab (which is the company which markets Penta water) http://www.bhrlab.com/.

There wasn't anything immediately woo-woo on this site either. Reading the page on "what are water clusters?" under "education materials" didn't ring any alarm bells. It seems reasonable. The first link on this page doesn't work. The second one sends you here:

http://www.aires.spb.ru/Structur_water/water_aires1_en.html

At first glance this doesn't seem too bad. I was even starting to wonder if there may be something in this cluster thing after all. Then I read this:

The structure-information property of water is the ability of water molecules to build clusters, whose structure is a code that contains information about interactions occurring (or having occurred) with a given water specimen.
Click to expand...

Uh-oh. Memory of water? Starting to sound a bit dodgy. But what "information" does this "code" store?

astro-, helio-, and geo-physical factors
the biological fields of various living objects
Click to expand...

It's strange because I might have read most of that article without thinking anything was wrong until the bit about "biological fields". If this is a quack article, it's not a bad one at first glance.

The claim that water clusters does not seem to be all that wacky. Water may indeed for short lived bonds (on nanosecond time scales according to the report) with several neighbouring atoms. However, the idea that any information could be stored in such structures in the long term just seems very doubtful.

The rest of the Bio Hydration site is not too bad. The rest of the stuff under "education materials" seems ok but is not necessarily relevant to the original penta-water claims. Nowhere do they give anyone enough rope to hang them with. That said, they don't necessarily give enough information for someone to verify their "research".
 
a bit OT, but a grocery store in my area started selling penta water about 6 months ago. i was in there the other day and they had marked the bottles down to $.69 and there was a huge stack of them. must not be selling well. too bad, eh? :)
 
Sigh.

Once again, somebody remind me of the ratio between inter-water-molecule bonding and the KT energy at 300K...

Please?

:p

I won't go into the line "tear down der Walls" :)
 
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