You, and most other multicellular creatures, have a heart that pumps blood around your body. This heart is made up of lots of heart cells that can contract when electricity is applied but also make a small amount of their own. A collection of heart cells will sync up and start beating in unison

If electricity flows through your heart it can muck up the signals causing the cells not to beat in the right sequence and either beat erratically or just stop it. This results in no blood flowing around your body and kills you

Small things don't have a heart, they're just a little fluid sack. You could hit them with enough electricity to break down their proteins but you'll have boiled the water inside them first and killed them that way

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When electricity meets water, it heats up and boils the organism. The problem is it'd take a lot of electricity to kill as much bacteria as we do with other methods that are more energy efficient.

And a bit funnier - there are a lot of varios materials in mud water which will start to react with each other if there is enogh current making water toxic and undrinkable

Putting electricity through water has the potential to produce other chemicals in the water that you would like to avoid

> the potential

lol

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And, you know, it gets turned into hydrogen and oxygen.

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Electricity works on potentials. Horses are particularly sensitive to electric shock because their front and back legs are a good distance apart, the voltage difference is large. They can even die by walking on ground near a broken electrical connection that a human wouldn't detect because of close-together feet. There is a system of electro fishing where current is passed into water to stun fish so they float to the surface to be caught. Counter-intuitively you can stun a large fish with a smaller current than needed to stun small fish. Now imagine the size of a microorganism....

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That's pretty much what a defribulator does. The heart muscles contracting out of sync is called fribulation, so a defribulator shocks them back into a regular rhythm.

You only have one mate

Basic premise of pace makers that are implanted in people.

I thought it basically temporarily overwhelmed all the electrical signals and effectively stopped the heart, allowing it to restart on its own but hopefully in sync..?

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Speak for yourself, I have at least 3.5!

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Tasty!

Small correction: the heart muscles contracting out of syc is called fibrillation and defibrillator shocks them back into rhythm.

Wait, is this a chess puzzle?

You would probably waste an awful lot of electricity, without being able to reach all the micro-organisms.

Ultrasound might be an answer though. I have seen a Swiss startup develop an ultrasound machine that you run your water through.

The vibrations field (or as Chromotron points out, the cavitation) has the effect of breaking down anything molecular that crosses it.

You can to a certain degree, but only with direct current.

Alternating current will not Work on molecular Level but very Well for organisms with a heart like mentioned in the comments. It will mess up with nerves and muscles.

Direct current on the other Hand will start electrolysis, meaning the water (H2O) will split into hydrogen and oxygen. While this process can cause cell mebranes of for example bacterias to burst, it will also lead to building Up flamable Gas (hydrogen) and loss of water (since its Split into those molecules). Its also very inefficient.

This process is used in the Aquarium Hobby to reduce algae. (Chihiros sterilizer)

Little funfact my chemistry prof once told us. If you use desinfect, like isopropanol, it kills the bacteria by dissolving their shell and their inner parts run out and they die.

Moral of the story, don't boil pool water

Can we hit co2 with electricity and split it into carbon and oxygen? Seems like that would be a way to reduce CO2 emissions. But not sure how efficient it is or would be. Probably would need some economies of scale to make it viable in the long term. I'm assuming. Both carbon and oxygen have industrial uses so should theoretically count as useful resources. At least at any reasonable scale.

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Whoa this was educational haha.

Makes sense.....electricity works on potential differences, which get larger with distances! So large organisms can straddle much larger potential difference zones.

Pure water electrolyses if you try hard enough. It's just silly inefficient.

Table salt is normally not used by people doing electrolysis. Other salts such as sodium/potassium hydroxide, or if nothing better is at hand, sodium (bi)carbonate, are safer, similarly cheap, and also do the job better.

We could. It would be horribly inefficient, taking way more than other methods, and most importantly, the current methods of power generation would produce way more CO2 than this destroys. And to make it work at all you would need to remove the CO2 from air to get a tank full of it; at which point you could just sequester it, store it underground, or whatever else works and takes much less energy.

Both carbon and oxygen are way easier to get differently, even if energy were free it would not be worth it.

Fun fact: this is also the reason why you cannot microwave fruit flies (in case you ever tried... for... reasons...).

It's probably not the vibrations but the ultrasound cavitation. It forms little bubbles at enormous forces, ripping stuff apart.

You are talking about photosynthesis. That's were all our fossil fuels come from.

Alternating current starts electrolysis just as well, only that now all products are created equally at both ends.

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No it's funnier his way 🤣

Like, life? Primordial soup, that sort of thing?

Yes, you can. I actually keep an electrolytic water purifier (mixed oxidant) in my emergency kit.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_water_purifier

> A simple brine {salt + water} solution in an electrolytic reaction produces a powerful mixed oxidant disinfectant (mostly chlorine in the form of hypochlorous acid (HOCl) and some peroxide, ozone, chlorine dioxide).

What if the lightning you use is greased? Surely then at least the chills would multiply?

So fun! Was he German? Sounds like he was German.

Watt?

TIL that I had zero idea how defribulator is spelled. I give it 30 minutes, then it's gone again.

Edit: turns out I knew very well it's spelled defibrillator. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked. And also the other one.

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I have zero mates.

So human life specifically?

I mean we could do all that.

Or we could just let plants do it for us

I think he means electrolysis. Putting a current in a solution (e.g between two metal prongs) makes the negative and positive charged particles flock to their according charge. Or new particles form. Its how the metal industry applies small films of materials to objects.

Ok I need an ELI5 on this

yes

That is how they kill harmful algae in the lake in my city.

Apply current across electrodes suspended from a motor boat cris-crosing the lake slowly.

Lmao holy shit i meant the cells

This is not ELI5 but.....Ozone is produced when oxygen (O2) molecules are dissociated by an energy source into oxygen atoms and subsequently collide with an oxygen molecule to form an unstable gas, ozone (O3), which is used to disinfect wastewater. Most wastewater treatment plants generate ozone by imposing a high voltage alternating current (6 to 20 kilovolts) across a dielectric discharge gap that contains an oxygen-bearing gas. Ozone is generated onsite because it is unstable and decomposes to elemental oxygen in a short amount of time after generation. Ozone is also commonly used to disinfect bottled drinking water, as it is both soluble and effective at killing microorganisms via the oxidisation of their cell membranes. (So you're not that far off....)

There are all these videos (I'll try and edit one in if I find it) of Chinese "water boilers", which are just + and - electrodes that you put into water. The problem is, even in "clean" water, the electrodes themselves begin to electrolyze into the water. The tap water isn't clean either, so all the minerals begin electrolyzing and depositing onto the cathode as well.

EDIT: This is used in a scam to show that one's water is actually impure, and that one should buy the salesman's water filter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASnLL6ebaco

UV light

So we can't use electrical activity per se, but we can use electron radiation (Beta irradiation) to sterilize food.

You shoot an electron beam at the fruit and it kills microorganisms living inside. The fruit doesn't rot as fast now!

Downside, you're probably killing the good microorganisms as well. Oops.

Electricity is so bad at killing microorganisms in small amounts that in lab sciences we actually use it to introduce new DNA into them through a process called Electroporation. Basically, you send electricity into a solution that contains your microorganism and the new DNA you want it to have, and you zap the solution to cause pores to form in its cell membrane. These holes are big enough to allow the DNA to enter. It’s a very useful technique.

Yeah "water purity" is a grey zone, lots of scams. When I was young I earned some cash as a handyman. The stuff some people wanted me to install in their water system was baffling. Especially since I live in an european country with probably the best tap water quality in the world.

edit: just watched the vid, hillarious, they are just disolving the toxic metal particles in the water holy moly and use distilled non conductive water for the "proof". Yay humanity!

Run amok? Like the people of Sherwood?

That hertz my feelings.

It will certainly be electrifying

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Killing the organisms in water by any means doesn't make it safe to drink. They dead corpses and other waste from them is still in the water and is just as dangerous to consume. That is why water needs to be actively filtered to be clean.

salt + electricity = bleach

I need to be part of the pun resistance and not partake.

I don’t really understand jokes like these. It’s just an attempt from people to stay current.

I just want to put a slight spin on things.

You cant kill small organisms (even some insects) in a microwave because the actual microwaves have a long enough wavelength that it doesn't produce a high enough gradient to heat their tiny bodies up.

The wave length is longer than the insects body so it doesn't do anything.

That's why you should still wash your hands even after using hand sanitizer. The dead bodies of the bacteria become food for the next generation

Why would they want baffling installed in their water system? Was it really that noisy?

If you take carbon and oxygen, burn them to produce CO2, any process you use to get back carbon and oxygen is by definition going to take as much or more energy then you got from burning it.

Chemical bonds all have a certain energy associated with forming and destroying them that must be paid (or released)

The only good microorganism is a dead microorgamism. Now lets make these microorgamisms good!

Its not just the little orginisms that can make you sick. Their poop can also make you sick. No amout of electricity is going to magic that away.

The problem with that approach is losing control, and then there's nothing left to do. I know that approach is the one that you want, but you'd better take my direction.

If you do it long enough then the water gets hot and boils and everything dies

It makes poison tho

Because electricity kills you either by stopping your heart or burning you to death...it would take a ridiculous amount of energy to thermally kill the microbes, and they don't have a heart or circulatory system so that's out the window...

Plus, electricity is used to genetically modify bacteria via electroporation. Jolting bacterial cell walls will open their pores and allow plasmids to entrr the cell. In nature, plasmids can confer various resistance or virulence genes. So, using electricity might even promote new traits and mutations.

i believe a sort of cream would be produced.

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Direct electricity would not get you the effect you want, but UV wands exists that can do what you’re saying. People use them for backpacking and camping.

> Small things don't have a heart, they're just a little fluid sack.

Hey, now!

Oh^m

They wanted to pump it up

> edit: just watched the vid, hillarious, they are just disolving the toxic metal particles in the water holy moly and use distilled non conductive water for the "proof". Yay humanity!

It might not be toxic.

Looked like steel, so you're primarily just producing iron oxide (rust) and dumping that into/onto the water. But also whatever else is alloyed into the steel. And I still wouldn't touch it.

I don't think this is true. Please cite a source.

Shocking, right?

Some googling seems to suggest you very much can microwave flies. There are however some spots inside a microwave that don't receive as much energy, so a fly might survive if it largely stays within those points.

Besides which, microwaves don't work by electrocuting what's put inside them.

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I'm amped up to see the next pun someone comes up with.

> Pure water electrolyses if you try hard enough. It's just silly inefficient.

You have to be trying really really hard though. There's a classic demo where you can make water maintain a bridge between two beakers, by putting a decent few kV across it. You need to use extremely pure water to avoid electrolysis, which is pretty successful.

> > Table salt is normally not used by people doing electrolysis. Other salts such as sodium/potassium hydroxide, or if nothing better is at hand, sodium (bi)carbonate, are safer, similarly cheap, and also do the job better.

Well.. It's actually pretty common, but not for when people want to make hydrogen. The Chloralkali process (i.e. NaCl hydrolysis) is the primary industrial method for producing tens of millions of tons of chlorine and sodium hydroxide.

You have the power to change that habit.

It is actually a little bit of evolutionary fluke that, in us, the electrical path from one hand to the other hand goes directly through our heart.

As a result, electricity is far more dangerous to us than to life in general.

Good point about the toxins still being in water but living organisms can multiply so they'll usually be more dangerous merely because they continue creating new toxins as time goes on.

Well, there goes my weekend

I thought it broke down chemicals like water into it's constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen.

The analogy is that voltage is like water pressure, so how does distance increase that?

Is it not possible to electrolyse them? Every cell uses ion pumps and things, to my knowledge.

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Yeah, if it's stainless steel for example, you're getting some delicious chromium, which is a Bad Time.

Electrical current requires energy to produce

Heat requires energy to produce

Energy is expensive

All else equal, a process that is less expensive is preferable

The energy it takes to sterilize water with heat is less than the energy it takes to sterilize it with electricity

Therefore sterilizing water with heat is preferable to doing so with electric current

To be fair, pure water doesnt conduct elctricity. So theyre technically correct

I’m not sure you have the capacitance.

lightening sparked life on earth then.

I'm positive someone will be able to come up with one...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjoDnJU243M

applying current to water will boil it. Note that the water became relatively darker than it was. Often it is harmless - oxidized iron. Sometimes it forms toxic compounds like sulfuric salts (such compounds do not darken the water and it is indistinguishable from normal water)

Like salt. Even the usual one, NaCl, dissolved in water and electrolyzed, dissipates to NaOH, NaOCl, HCl, H2 and Cl2. HCl, H2 and Cl2 are gaseous, so they bubble out, but NaOH (lye) and NaOCl (bleach) stays in solution.

And that's just one example, there's multitude of other chemicals that's produced by electrolysis, potentially making water toxic.

throw in some water and make sugars. About the same idea as photosynthesis. Of course, electricity-driven reactions don't tend to be all that controlled and there is a lot of competition by other reactions, so costly and inefficient is probably a good description. It is why we don't already do that.

Just making carbon would be a fool's game, because the carbon would want to react back with any free oxygen as soon as it could. generally as a big fire. Sure, we can deal with elemental carbon in lots of ways (it doesn't generally spontaneously combust) but you would have to do something with all that carbon. And, of course, there is the question of how you make the electricity in the first place, ideally not from burning coal or inefficiencies would mean you release more CO2 than you break apart/recover.

But yeah, at least it is an idea. Thinking and coming up with ideas is usually a good thing. Most ideas turn out to have more problems than they solve, but occasionally a good one comes up, so don't stop, don't get discouraged that your idea isn't practical. Hardly alone with that.

I dunno, I feel like this isn't conductive to stimulating discussion.

Edit. I was too late, but I'm glad to see there's a spark in people to make more puns.

Some of these puns, they need to be inducted into the pun hall of fame!

And lye, NaOH.

Fun fact: bacteriaphages (viruses that only target bacteria) are very effective at decontaminating and preserving food.

Fruit flies, not normal flies. Normal flies are large enough to die. The heating of an object significantly below the wavelength (centimeters) is proportional to the size, due to the electric potential created by the microwaves. The fruit flies also have the added bonus of much surface area per volume.

It is also not just the sweet spots, the flies survive even if they move around randomly. Anyway, here is a video by Cody.

The science that keeps our heart moving is the same science that keeps their fluid sacks not shriveled or exploding. The concentrations of ions/salts on each side of the membrane creates a difference in voltage across the cell membrane, which creates potential energy. if that goes to equilibrium the cell is dead.

Idk if electricity would kill what’s in the water, but if you do something to the water to make the difference in voltage across their membranes become zero, they are essentially dead. It would be hard to calculate a voltage and duration or whatever to make every singe membrane in your sample go to equilibrium. Idk dammit Jim I’m a dietitian not a mad physics professor.

Also, not everything needs to be living to be dangerous. Many pathogens make things that cause us illness, if that thing is still in the water even after the microbe has died, we still get sick. And there are inorganic things that can make us sick, also. Plus spore-forming bacteria could die but leave tough little spores behind waiting to respawn. So..ya. Now I’m having physiology flashbacks and I’ll probably have nightmares on differentiating calcium channels.

More like what's in the toilet after a night of drinking and greasy food.

depends on the water. 'pure' water is actually an insulator, so that wouldn't work

if it has ions dissolved, e.g. SALT (not sugar!) or SOAP (don't drop the radio in the tub!) then it becomes a conductor and then, depending on what is IN the water, might kill it

but then you're left with ionised (salty, soapy, other) water full of muck

just boil it dude.

Been doing some home electrolysis for fun. Everything I read about chromium has me feeling like this.

That's how these scams work though, right? They prey on half-truths, things that "feel" right.

Like salt. Even the usual one, NaCl, dissolved in water and electrolyzed

And some of them are just revolting.

You might feel electrified to see yours on display, a spark of joy!

https://www.espwaterproducts.com/understanding-uv-water-filtration-sterilization/

UV light can be used in a way similar to what you are asking.

I am not endorsing the above product. It's just the first Google search result that had an easy explanation.

In a way no: electricity can kill by stopping the muscles of the circulatory system, mainly heart and diaphragm, or burn due to high resistance. Microorganisms usually lack a circulatory system or are too small to provide any real resistance. And electricity doesn’t remove physical contaminates.

In a way yes: if you filter the water add salt and apply direct current you can make a weak solution of sodium hypochlorite or bleach (0.8% vs household/laundry bleach 5.5%). That can be used to disinfect other amounts of water. It’s a pretty controlled process and uses a lot of energy look up on-site generation for more info. Also, don’t drink bleach. Unless you have Covid lol.

Anecdotal experience: I was a pump operator for storm water and potable water systems. One of the older lift stations for storm water used 120 volt electrodes for its control circuit. So the wet well would have 120v in it. During maintenance periods we had to go in and vacuum out trash and sediments from the bottom. The water was not clean and you would find mosquito larvae swimming around. We also used on site chlorine generators for our drinking water wells.

Heat produced from electrical current (see: Amperature) is what causes tissue damage in organisms. It’s much more effective to use electrical energy create temperatures that are unfavourable than it is zap bacteria.

On another note, the US Army Corp uses electrical current in bodies of water to create invisible barriers for invasive species:

https://www.lrc.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works-Projects/ANS-Portal/Barrier/

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In that case it's not the electricity that kills them, it's a product of a chemical reaction set off by electricity

There’s typically other things in the water that can be broken down / chemically changed. Even something like salt water can produce chlorine gas

Imagine it more as water flowing downhill. Small horizontal distance, not too much change in gravitational potential energy, but from the top of a mountain to the bottom there's a huge difference there.

Okay but then we need virusesphageses.

To save the bacteria?

Yeah, fuck chromium. I grew up in a town that had a chrome plating factory and they dumped their waste in the creek that ran alongside two schools. I was born with correctable heart defect but damn there were a lot of kids with cancer.

Yeah. Poor little guys.

If I tossed you into a swimming pool and added a few volts it would not pass through you unless you touched a ground, like the metal ladder. Then you would be in trouble. So, you could kill all those tiny bugs but they would need to touch a lot of tiny ladders.

The Frankenstein effect

Doesn't make sense in the context of one horse's leg to another. (vs the distance from one human leg to another being a lower pressure)

So imagine the horizontal distance, not the diagonal distance.

The front foot is the equivalent of the top of a river up a mountain, and the back foot is the equivalent of the estuary at sea level.

The human's horizontal foot distance is much less, so there is a much smaller difference between the potential from one foot to the other.

I was wondering where you were going with your analogy, thinking "well, the water wouldn't be electrified while you were drinking it!"

I know I'm only playing

I’m hopelessly devoted to this methodology.

That’s prison coffee to you, sir.

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The surface beneath our feet usually has fairly high resistance. So voltage fades away quickly, electricity doesn't travel too far. If there's a live wire in the earth underground that's broken, a front hoof and a back hoof can be at very different voltages, so the power travels through the horse in preference to the earth. This is not a good thing.

Like boiling the water?

Sure we can!

This is incomplete - electroporation relies on large voltages but little to no current to be effective. If there are enough ions (i.e. salt) in your bacterial culture to carry a current, it will kill the bacteria (based on my experience with E. coli).

Ah, so a larger distance wouldn't guarantee a larger voltage, it would merely raise the chances because of changes to the surface being walked on.

Or, wait. No, the voltage difference is because one hoof is over electricity while the other hoof is over zero or fewer electricity, so now electricity will travel through the horse which is electrically conductive.

> The surface beneath our feet usually has fairly high resistance

That's if we're wearing sneakers, right?

Like if one foot were barefoot and the other wearing a sock, we'd create a large difference in voltage?

Only if you suspend the insect in a vacuum. And don‘t move it.

There is less of a distance between a person's two feet than that of a horses front/back legs. Earth, the surface beneath our feet, typically has a high resistance. There is a higher chance "electricity" will choose to flow through a horse, as it has to either travel that distance through the horse, or through the ground. For a person, that distance is smaller, therefore less resistance, and less likely to use us a bridge between two spots on the ground.

Mmmm nope. I did it as a science fair project back in the day :P

Blasted fruit flies for a minute and not a single dead one.

Infact: the microwaves are just a little bigger than the holes in the window on the front door.

So pretty much anything smaller than those holes cannot be heated by the microwave oven. (in air)

Obviously if you put it in a cup of water the water is going to boil.

you’re thinking of electrophoresis (and techniques that apply this phenomenon such as electroplating), not electrolysis

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If the water was 100% distilled fresh water it would be fine. But distilling the water achieves the desired effect in the first place

Funny enough that's how we get near pure gold.

The levels of electricity required to kill microbes would probably heat the water and/or cause some reactive chemicals to be produced that would kill them, not the electricity itself. Electricity will not clear muddy water. A lot of muddy materials are organic and would not be attracted to the electrodes.

Jersey City?

Nah, Northern California, Willits

Jersey City used to regularly turn some shade of purple because of the factory. Now there's a gated community in place of the factory.

The local wetlands preserve says not to eat the crabs in the water because you'll get cancer.

Electricity interrupts nerve impulses, which isn't helpful for microorganisms without nerves. It could help with nematodes and some some other animal pathogens. But water isn't a very good conductor of electricity and it would be hard to ensure that it's effective at killing everything rather than just some/most things.

Another way electricity kills stuff is by heating up the organism enough to cause severe tissue damage, but this is difficult to do with water and will take a lot of energy. Boiling has the same effect.

I was unaware of that. Thanks for the correction!