This article was first published in 2005.
Structured water is serious science. It must be real because generations of big instruments have been deployed to detect it; the latest to capture the headlines being ultra-fast electron crystallography after more than a decade of neutron scattering, X-ray diffraction, nuclear magnetic resonance, etc., not to mention the considerable number-crunching to extract information out of the data, and hours upon hours of computer simulations that go into modelling it.
But no one has actually seen structured water itself, which makes it much more elusive than unidentified flying objects or poltergeists. The best that the string of high-power instruments has produced are ghostly diffraction patterns, and bumps on squiggly-lined spectra that only the specialists running these scientific séances can decipher.
But structured water, or at least, one form of it, has finally been caught on camera; not an ordinary camera, admittedly. Researchers at the A.J. Drexel Nanotechnology Institute in Drexel University, Philadelphia and University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, have produced stunning high-resolution transmission electron-micrographs of carbon nanotubes of different sizes with water trapped inside them.
