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Pure water is an almost perfect insulator.
Yes, water found in nature conducts electricity – but that's because of the impurities therein, which dissolve into free ions that allow an electric current to flow. Pure water only becomes "metallic" – electronically conductive – at extremely high pressures, beyond our current abilities to produce in a lab.
But, as researchers demonstrated for the first time back in 2021, it's not only high pressures that can induce this metallicity in pure water.
By bringing pure water into contact with an electron-sharing alkali metal – in this case an alloy of sodium and potassium – free-moving charged particles can be added, turning water metallic.
Scientists Transformed Pure Water Into a Metal – And There's Video
Pure water is an almost perfect insulator.
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