I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
eeehhh, because we humans decided to give that name to water! We made up the word wet and most likely to describe water! Like we describe a block of ice as cold or water vapour as steam!
0
Dear Sarahb ; It has something to do with the structure and chemistry of water(H2O). H2O can stick to each other through hydrogen bond(H-bond). Usually one H2O has 3 H-bonds, thus stick to other 3 H2O, but 4 H-bonds in ice state. These H-bonds are not stable, and keep changing partners very, very fast.
The atoms of water molecule have LOCAL charges; O(-2) and H(+1). It makes H2O to interact with each other and other molecules or objects through something called ‘ionic interaction’. There are other properties of H2O but I won’t go into them.
Water can cling to you or to your cloths through H-bonding, ionic interaction, etc. and you feel ‘wet’.
1
Water being ‘wet’ is the same as a saucepan being ‘hot’, or the floor being ‘hard’. It is a description of what we feel, a sense of something. Our brain takes information that your sensory cells are picking up, and uses what it knows about different objects to figure out what you are touching. So when you touch water, it takes into account things like temperature, viscosity (how runny something is), how much pressure it is applying on your skin, how it is moving. All these things help your brain decide that water feels wet.
You can try out differences in the classroom or at home! Dip your fingers into different types of liquids. Do they all feel ‘wet’? What differences are there between a liquid that feels ‘wet’, and one that feels ‘sticky’?
0