Water funny liquid

Every living thing can thank water for those wonderful properties, because without them it’s impossible to imagine life on Earth. To pick just one example, without water to transport heat around the globe, what would our atmosphere, climate and weather be like? While we often curse the UK’s rainy climate, all that warm, moist air is responsible for us experiencing more benign temperatures than the extremes we should expect from our latitude.

Closer to home, a great many Earth-bound labs have spent a great many hours and years studying the properties of water, more so than any other compound in the vastness of chemical space. Partly of course this is due to its ubiquity – a great many synthetic chemists can attest to how difficult it is to exclude the stuff from their reaction vessels, after all. But more importantly it’s down to those properties.