Can you do this with H2 I wonder
You could light your burps with special fizzy cola. Or drive fuel cells etc.
Oil and water do mix, a group of scientists have discovered. The two substances normally repel one another, but under extreme conditions oil molecules can dissolve in water. A group of physicists from the University of Edinburgh in the UK filled tiny capsules with water and methane gas and subjected them to intense pressures. …
"mixing oil and water..."
The same thing happened to the Mrs' rover shortly after I met her, although there was a human factor involved instead of a head gasket. I'd been out to the pub for a 'solids free' sunday lunch, and thought it'd be a good idea to check the levels on her car. Topped up the coolant with Castrol GTX. Shit was I popular. Fortunately, a couple of months later (yep, I was still hearing about it a couple of months later) she topped up the petrol with diesel. She also didn't have the cast iron excuse of being a bit pissed at the time.
Virtually every well-used outboard motor has this ability. Fishing line cuts the propshaft seal, allowing water to seep in[0]. Mix thoroughly with lower unit gears. Instant milky goo.
[0] Some of the oil leaks out, too, of course, but water is far less viscous. Couple that with the gearcase heating up & forcing expanding air out, then cooling off and thus forming a partial vacuum ... you might say it sucks. Fortunately, it's an easy fix.
"the covalent bonds in other polar molecules like salts and sugars"
Sugar molecules have slightly polar covalent bonds. Simple salts don't have covalent bonds at all. Here's a good and very short description of covalent vs. ionic bonds:
http://wps.prenhall.com/esm_brown_chemistry_9/0,4647,170666-,00.html
"breaking apart the covalent bonds in other polar molecules like salts and sugars"
Wrong on both counts. Salts are packed arrays of ions such as Sodium (+ve) and Chlorine (-ve). Sugar crystals are bound together by a mixture of weak polar bonds between hydroxyl groups and good ol' Van der Waals forces that make most things stick together to some (weak) degree. VdV forces keep hydrocarbons together when they are liquid or solid. Water, being itself polar, binds to ions and hydroxyls alike, thus liberating them from the need to stick together. Some salts, however, resist even water's charms: silver chloride and lead iodide, for instance.
If I want to mix oil and water (or, say a watery substance like vinegar or lemon juice) I don't fiddle with diamonds and hydraulic presses, I just use an emulsifier, like egg yolk.
And like others already pointed out: salts have ionic bonds and dissolving sugars does not involve breaking covalent bonds.
just to mention, water has a 'dissolved gas' capacity that varies by temperature and pressure. Otherwise fish couldn't breathe, though I suppose algae could still grow since CO2 has a high affinity for water.
The minimum level of dissolved gas in water occurs in the range of about 165F (as I recall). When you boil water, you'll see a point where you get bubbles along the walls of the pot. but temperature is too low for boiling. This is the dissolved gas coming out of solution. Stir it and the bubbles go away as the gas is liberated from the water, and the bubbles don't re-form again. The water has lost the excess dissolved gas.
At the low temperature end, maximum gas capacity is at around 34F.
sorry for using the old Fahrenheit scale. I should've used something more "El Reg", like maybe expressing the temperature in Hiltons, but then I would've become confused or something.
In any case, as you raise pressure, dissolved gas capacity increases.
So yeah, gaseous hydrocarbons will dissolve in water, given a high enough pressure and proper temperature. It may just be that.
/me points out that this is why warm soda/beer goes flat, but cold soda/beer retains its fizz.
"And here I thought it was us Yanks who were into junk food ..."
It should be pointed out that for most of the 1950s a fizzy drink was a rare luxury for many children in England. The higher price of Lucozade put it into a class of its own. Chickens were another rare luxury until their mass production took off - when people complained they tasted of fish.
May I make a couple points?
My homebrewed ales are served at cellar temperature (43F, 6C). That's quite a bit cooler than room temperature around these parts. They have plenty of CO2 dissolved in them, as a residual effect of the fermentation process. Not enough to be called "fizzy", to be sure, but still enough to produce a nice head without force carbonating.
I rather suspect that many a Guinness aficionado (self included) would have a bone to pick with you over calling forced-fizz "crap".
Methane forms clathrate or 'cage' compounds at highish pressures and low temperatures. Basically, methane is trapped within an ice-like water structure, and the presence of the hydrocarbon stabilises the structure even at temperatures rather above the freezing point of water. Methane migrating upwards from deep in ocean sediments along the geothermal gradient becomes trapped a few metres below the cold seawater present at the seabed (~ 2 deg C)
The effect is to 'stiffen' that layer within the sediment and produce an acoustic reflection horizon, visible on reflection profiles. Back in the 1960s geophysicists were quite puzzled. Took a while to work out what was going on.
You can actually set fire to these ice-like compounds. Looks very odd, burning ice.
So I suppose you could say that methane and water have been known to mix for quite a long time, at least as a solid phase. But clearly, it's a lot more fun with diamonds.
In 2003 Australian National University chemists discovered that when the dissolved gases were removed from water then oil could be mixed with it.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3408-oil-and-water-do-mix-after-all/
It says "findings shed light on how water-repelling substances behave under high pressures, such as those found at the ocean floor" but then the pressure is 20 times that of the Mariana trench.
Which ocean floor are they talking about? Or did I miss the part where boffins are already exploring extra-solar ocean floors?
So is this like nitrogen in blood when you scuba dive, at depths the pressurised nitrogen can leave the blood and accumulate in joints (for example), but as you surface the gas expands and does what the layman calls the 'Bends' if you don't give it time to evacuate from the joints and back into the blood (safety stops)..
So in the same principle, when they removed the pressure did the methane separate back from the water molecules, and if so did it really combine in the conventional way of thinking.
Just thinking out loud, if I'm wrong correct me as it's an interesting concept, but they didn't explain what happened when the pressure was released.