Osmosis
Diffusion
Evaporation
Solubility

One that I learned about when my youngest daughter was born is 'surfactin'
the body uses this to lubricate the lungs and a ridiculous amount of water is used in combination with it. Like a 10-oz. bottle every two hours for a newborn. lol. That's like you and I drinking a gallon of water every two hours.

That one may not be well-known to your teacher and could be your slam-dunk.

It might also be of interest that medical science created a hormone called surfana(sp?) to quickly interact with water in the human body to cause the lung air sacs to separate quickly in patients suffering from suffocation due to dehydration which exhibits symptoms equivalent to asthma in small children.

All of that is from memory, so you'll definitely have to use google for yourself.

And to add a bit more. Why life is as it is also relates to the properties of water and the compounds in them. Diffusion rates impact selection, as does availability - what can I take in? How much of it is out there? What can I take in and expel the fastest? Could such chemistry help explain why there are hundreds of amino acids in nature and all life as we know it use only a fraction and all life uses the same acids? You could look into that.

Some abiogenetic theories postulate compounds dropping out of solution and concentrating in evaporating pools as well.

ALL abiogenesis theories rely upon water, obviously.

You need to think of what is essential to life as we know it. What do ALL cells do? WHY does this require water?

*shrug*

Waters cool stuff. The four big properties to talk about are Cohesion, Moderation of Temperature, Insulation, and Solvency.

Cohesion is of course important because it allows for the transportation of H2O and solutes to travel up against gravity. It also allows for capillary action. This is all good for us, since we rely on plants to survive.

Moderation of temperature is really big as well. H2O has a really high specific heat. It's easy to remember H2O's specific heat, since specific heat is defined as how much energy must be absorbed or diffused to raise or lower 1 g of substance by 1 degree C. Since a Calorie is defined as the amount of heat necessary to cause 1 g of H2O to change by 1 degree C. Therefore, the specific heat of H2O is 1 cal/g/degree C. This is actually really high compared to other molecules. This is why boiling water takes so long. This is a really good thing, since it means that the earth won't heat up really quickly. Imagine if the specific heat of water was 0.5 cal/g/degree C. The oceans would exponentially heat up and we'd all fry.

Now, since water has a high specific heat, it also has a high heat of evaporation. This is good, since that means for every gram of H2O that evaporates it takes off with it a bunch of heat. So when it evaporates off of you for instance, it cools you off. Which is why sweating works.

Insulation. Since solid water (ice) is lighter than liguid water, it floats. This insulates the water and helps to make sure the bottom of lake or stream almost never freezes. Large lakes will almost certainly never totally freeze because of this effect. This is great since it keeps aquatic life alive...and we all came from the ocean, eh?

Water is also a great solvent. It will dissolve any polar molecule, aka hydrophilic molecules, and also will work on amphipathic molecules which have both hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions. This is important because if water didn't dissolve stuff, then it couldn't be transported through plants...not to mention how it transports stuff in our body. Also, buffers just wouldn't work without waters solvent properties.

These are the four main properties of water.

While nothing you just said is technically wrong, brainman, I do want to reiterate that things are actually quite simple and fundamentally controlled by basic chemistry (i.e. osmosis and protonic transport (simply another sort of the same fundamental priciple, IMO)).

Certainly, we do get into stipulations when discussing active vs. passive transport, but both mechanisms involve simple osmosis. The main stipulation being those that require energy input and those that do not.

Osmosis IS how material goes in and out of a cell, sodium and potassium pumps rely on osmosis as well.

So iIn the case of active transport proteins move against the concentration gradient. Look at the Na+/P- pump in nerve cells. Na+ is maintained at lower cocentration within the cells and K+ is at higher concentrations compared with the outside. The reverse is the case on the outside of the cell. When we have a thought, ions pass across the lipid layer.

I thought I should also mention that Na+/K+ pumps don't rely on osmosis. In fact, they rely heavily on Na+-K+-ATPase, which is a highly conserved enzyme. It is responsible for the phosphorilation that drives the action of the pump. Osmosis has nothing to do with it as far as I know. The pump is a form of active transport, which means that the cell is using ATP (energy) to get stuff in and out. Once again, osmosis is not how "material" gets in and out of a cell.

This isn't exactly true, but it's close. A cell can die pretty easily by having too much or too little water. There has to be a balance so that the cell doesn't explode or shrivel up and die. So water isn't allowed to just go on it whenever it wants, if it was, whenever you ate some salty food then the cells in your mouth would all shrivel up and die, just for example. There is for that effect vast regulation of water going in and out of a cell. You can still kill a cell by putting it into too hypotonic or hypertonic of a solution, but the regulation helps. This is why you shouldn't drink pure water...

What is your research on?

Mike,
Drop a resume by the US Ink headquarters in New Jersey.

CORPORATE OFFICE
651 Garden Street
Carlstadt, NJ 07072
TEL 201 935-8666
800 423-8838
FAX 201 933-3728

There are a lot of new types of ink being researched including the ultraviolet quick set inks for high quality printing. They need considerable improvements made on them before I commit to buying the $5,000 per set curing lights.
Also they are seeing a decline in flexographic ink sales due to some minor quality issues with the alcohol reagent content.

I've been a field guinea pig several times for their new products all the way back to soy carrier black ink and indigo steel glitter. Oh and the gold ink too. I haven't gotten my gold ink award yet but hell I've only been doing it for 15 years.

Back to topic: sort of
Water is also important in my life because the future of inks is to move to a type that washes off with plain water instead of using higher voc cleaning fluids.