Aquafina bottled water doesn’t freeze.
Rumors that Aquafina bottled water does not freeze have been a fixture of the internet for over a decade. On Internet forums and blogs, the claims are usually presented anecdotally and are often layered with strong innuendo about what nefarious chemicals PepsiCo, the parent company of Aquafina, could be hiding in their products. The claim resurfaced with a 2016 YouTube
video titled “AQUAFINA DOESN’T FREEZE. Why? Antifreeze.. (maybe too, radio-active..),” which has been posted on conspiracy-focused web sites. That video shows a construction worker at a chilly job site perplexed by a number of “partially consumed,” unfrozen bottles of Aquafina surrounded by a variety of other
bottled waters that are frozen solid. It bears mentioning that this video, uploaded by YouTube user “King Johnny” who captioned it with a lengthy but largely unrelated rant about Monsanto, aspartame, and the Government of Canada, provides no evidence that: Therefore this video cannot be used in support of the claim that Aquafina bottled water does not freeze. Similarly, there is no reason to taken it any more seriously than the numerous YouTube videos of Aquafina
actually freezing. To those who have taken the King Johnny video at face value, two contradictory hypotheses have been offered:
Neither explanation holds any water (or ice). Supercooled water exists in a liquid state below the freezing point of water, something that can occur if water contains no impurities and is cooled slowly without disturbance:
As Aquafina (and other bottled water) is heavily filtered to remove impurities, it is possible that an unopened, slowly cooled, and undisturbed bottle of water could remain liquid below freezing. Indeed this fact has created a popular genre of YouTube videos showing seemingly magic people instantly freezing bottled water by shaking or opening bottles that have been slowly cooled and left undisturbed or unopened. Supercooled liquid does not work as an explanation for the King Johnny video, however, as the bottles were already opened and are therefore likely to contain contaminants necessary to serve as a nucleus for ice crystals. The more paranoid explanation, that some nefarious chemical or chemicals have been added to Aquafina water, is equally problematic. Aquafina water is regularly tested, as are the sources from which it comes, and there is no evidence that it contains any more radioactivity than is expected of anything found in nature. Conspiracy web site BeforeItsNews.com suggested that the chemical propylene glycol, which is used for a variety of purposes in processed food and drinks, and which has antifreeze properties, could be the cause Aquafina’s purported inability to freeze. However, there is no evidence that the chemical is used in distilled water (none of its usual uses are relevant to the bottling process), and it would take a significant amount of the chemical — which imparts a sweet taste — to significantly lower the freezing point of a bottle of water. Videos purporting to show Aquafina water not freezing as evidence of some chemical abnormality inherent to the beverage are scientifically suspect and impossible to verify. However, because Aquafina water does, in fact, freeze, we rank this claim as false. Making ice cubes is a simple process: you take a plastic ice-cube tray like you'd find in most households, fill it with water and put it in the freezer. Before long, the water crystallises and turns to ice. If you were to analyse the structure of ice crystals, you'd see that the water molecules are arranged in regular 3-dimensional lattice structures. In water, by contrast, the molecules are unorganised, which is the reason that water flows. Glassy water Led by Professors Raffaele Mezzenga and Ehud Landau, a group of physicists and chemists from ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich have now identified an unusual way to prevent water from forming ice crystals, so even at extreme sub-zero temperatures it retains the amorphous characteristics of a liquid. In a first step, the researchers designed and synthesised a new class of lipids (fat molecules) to create a new form of "soft" biological matter known as a lipidic mesophase. In this material, the lipids spontaneously self-assemble and aggregate to form membranes, behaving in a similar way as natural fat molecules. These membranes then adopt a uniform arrangement to form a network of connected channels that measure less than one nanometer in diameter. Temperature and water content, as well as the novel structure of the designed lipid molecules determine the structure that the lipidic mesophase takes. No space for water crystals What's so special about this structure is that -- unlike in an ice-cube tray -- there is no room in the narrow channels for water to form ice crystals, so it remains disordered even at extreme sub-zero temperatures. The lipids don't freeze either. Using liquid helium, the researchers were able to cool a lipidic mesophase consisting of a chemically modified monoacylglycerol to a temperature as low as minus 263 degrees Celsius, which is a mere 10 degrees above the absolute zero temperature, and still no ice crystals formed. At this temperature, the water became "glassy," as the researchers were able to demonstrate and confirm in a simulation. Their study of this unusual behaviour of water when confined within a lipidic mesophase was recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. "The key factor is the ratio of lipids to water," explains Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from the Laboratory of Food & Soft Materials at ETH Zurich. Accordingly, it is the water content in the mixture that determines the temperatures at which the geometry of the mesophase changes. If, for example, the mixture contains 12 percent water by volume, the structure of the mesophase will transition at about minus 15 degrees Celsius from a cubic labyrinth to a lamellar structure. Natural antifreeze for bacteria "What makes developing these lipids so tricky is their synthesis and purification," says Ehud Landau, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Zurich. He explains that this is because lipid molecules have two parts; one that is hydrophobic (repels water) and one that is hydrophilic (attracts water). "This makes them extremely difficult to work with," he says. The soft biomaterial formed from the lipid membranes and water has a complex structure that minimises the water's contact with the hydrophobic parts and maximises its interface with the hydrophilic parts. The researchers modelled the new class of lipids on membranes of certain bacteria. These bacteria also produce a special class of self-assembling lipids that can naturally confine water in their interior, enabling the microorganisms to survive in very cold environments. "The novelty of our lipids is the introduction of highly strained three-membered rings into specific positions within the hydrophobic parts of the molecules," says Landau. "These enable the necessary curvature to produce such tiny water channels and prevent lipids to crystallize." Soft matter for research These new lipidic mesophases will serve primarily as a tool for other researchers. They can be utilised to non-destructively isolate, preserve and study large biomolecules in a membrane-mimicking environment, for instance by using cryogenic electron microscopy. Biologists are increasingly turning to this method to determine the structures and functions of large biomolecules such as proteins or large molecular complexes. "In the normal freezing process, when ice crystals form they usually damage and destroy membranes and crucial large biomolecules, which prevents us from determining their structure and function when they interact with lipid membranes," Mezzenga says. But not with the new mesophase, which is non-destructive and preserves such molecules in their original state and in presence of the other key building block of life, that is the lipids. "Our research is paving the way for future projects to determine how proteins might be preserved in their original form and interact with lipid membranes at very low temperatures," says the ETH professor. Story Source: Materials provided by ETH Zurich. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Does bottled spring water freeze?Bottled Drinking Water From Stores Does Not Freeze.
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