TU STUDENTS INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN FREE 24 SEPTEMBER ZOOM WEBINAR ON PROMOTING REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE

Thammasat University students interested in science, future studies, innovation, bioengineering, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 24 September Zoom webinar conference on Promoting Revolutionary Science.

The event, on Tuesday, 24 September 2024 at 7am Bangkok time, is presented by the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and College of Arts and Sciences.

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of revolutionary science.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://u-tokyo-ac-jp.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0qc-6uqTouGtAwB1NUiKXT-8SSBX3sfruU#/registration

The event announcement states:

Revolutionary science has the capacity to change the world. Recently, however, scientific advances have been mainly incremental, not revolutionary. The reason may reside in the very organizations that fund science, which inadvertently tend to suppress revolutionary science in favor of incremental science. To deal with that problem, an organization specifically designed to promote revolutionary science has come into being. The Institute for Venture Science (IVS) will be described, emphasizing the method by which it promotes scientific revolutions.

Speaker Bio

Gerald Pollack is professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington. He is Founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal, WATER, convener of the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water, and Executive Director of the Institute for Venture Science. He is also a Founding Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and a Fellow of both the American Heart Association and the Biomedical Engineering Society. His interests have ranged broadly, from biological motion and cell biology to the interaction of biological surfaces with aqueous solutions. His 2001 book, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life, and his newest book, The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor, won distinguished awards from the Society for Technical Communication.

Professor Pollack’s books are available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

A 2008 University of Washington announcement explained:

Revolutionary theory of water focus of annual UW faculty lecture Jan. 30

The human body is two-thirds water. Oceans cover 71 percent of our planet. Water fills each one of our cells, and without it life cannot exist.

“Water is the most abundant entity on the Earth, and yet the reasons for its unusual and interesting properties are poorly understood,” says Gerald Pollack, professor of bioengineering. “Our understanding of water is primitive.”

Pollack will deliver the 32nd annual UW faculty lecture, Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views From The Water’s Edge at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 30, in 130 Kane. Admission is free and the public is welcome.

His revolutionary theory of water could affect studies from cell biology to cloud formation, and might even explain how oceanic depressions can swallow up ships at sea.

People have long known that water is different from other liquids. Water’s freezing point and boiling point are “off the charts,” Pollack says. Science textbooks simply report that water is an exception to most rules. Pollack believes he may be on to an answer. For the past decade the UW researcher has been convincing worldwide audiences that water isn’t quite a liquid. In many cases — in the neighborhood of electrically charged, or water-loving, surfaces — it’s more like a gel, or a liquid crystal.

So the inside of a living cell is less like a water balloon, according to Pollack, and more like the kind of goo you’d see inside a raw egg.

He began his watery odyssey about a decade ago. In 2001 he published a book on water in living things, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life. The colorful illustrated book, written for a general audience, won the Distinguished Award as well as “Best in Show” from the Society for Technical Communication. It also got Pollack thinking more deeply about water’s structure. About five years ago he set out to test those theories.

“We found something astonishing,” Pollack recalls. A few of his scientific predecessors had proposed that a charged surface could cause water molecules to line up, as they do in a crystal, as far out as 100 molecules. But his experiments showed dissolved particles disappeared and light waves behaved differently — two clues that the water molecules are lined up — in a layer 1 million molecules wide. That’s more than 10,000 times what was previously believed.

Recently, independent research confirmed his group’s early results, which initially drew skepticism from the scientific establishment because they question long-held premises.

“It’s very innovative work,” says Brent Stewart, a UW professor of radiology and one of the faculty members who nominated Pollack for the lecture. “The current paradigm is that water molecules are only structured out to at most five or six molecules. Jerry’s been able to show this out to one millimeter.”

Proposing a new structure for water isn’t just a matter of rewriting science textbooks. Water’s basic structure affects biology, chemistry and engineering. For one thing, gels can switch to solids depending on factors like temperature, acidity or the concentration of dissolved substances — conditions that change often in the body. A gel-filled cell transitioning to a solid could help explain muscle contraction, a major focus of Pollack’s 40-year career at the UW.

And that’s only the beginning.

“This impacts almost everything. If it’s right, it can’t help but create a revolution,” Pollack says.

Fields other than biology would also be affected. A new theory for water could explain why freshwater and saltwater don’t tend to mix in our oceans. Or why raindrops bounce off the surface of Lake Washington — water’s surface tension is much higher than expected. It could even explain why sinkholes — large depressions in the ocean’s surface — could cause the disappearance of ships. The researchers saw a similar behavior in their lab experiments.

Using the findings, Pollack’s bioengineering research group is devising a way to purify water without filters by collecting the pure liquid crystal that he found forms near a charged surface. He’s also working on some other applications that he won’t yet divulge.

Over the years Pollack has presented his work at many international meetings. In 2004 he chaired a Gordon Research Conference on water’s structure in living organisms. He is currently establishing a multidisciplinary journal for water research.

“The interest has been extraordinary,” Pollack says. “After a presentation I’m inevitably approached by people who say they want to get involved.”

This is the first time his ideas will be presented before a general UW audience. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)