Sample article from the May 2000 Star Beacon

Living water gets attention at science fair

Scotty

by Scott J. Ulrich

This past Christmas '99, I found out about a new product: Revitalized Water.

Chadron State College holds the annual Honors Fair every year. This is the equivalent of a science fair. Since I didn't have a project yet and the fact of changing water didn't seem plausible to me, I decided to run some tests.

I had my mom (publisher) lend me her "Nordic" Original Water Revitalizer to test the water. I ran across some of the claims from Nordic on-line. I ran tests on some claims and some of my own tests. I ran the following scientific tests:

Some of my more non-scientific tests were: a taste test and blind taste test.

Living water is supposed to change the composition of ordinary water while just sitting in between two bottles of revitalized water facing a north-south position. I tested the one-liter water bottles A (revitalized), B (revitalized), C (tap), and D (tap, control) for about 16 hours. I tested them for pH level. There didn't seem to be too much of a change in the water B, which was placed in the middle, and the same with D, which was placed at the other end of a 30-foot room.

I looked at all four under a microscope and couldn't find any difference in any of the bottles of water. Finally, I taste-tested B and D and found that B tasted slightly better than D. Although it was closer to D than to either A or C.

I tested the effects on plant growth for three weeks. I started by adding the same amount of normal soil I found outside. I added the same amount of four different types of flowers. Every day I would add 1/4 cup original revitalized water to experiment A and 1/4 cup tap water to experiment B. The first to sprout a leaf was A. A continued to grow a lot of green plants. B only sprouted a few green plants that were relatively small, but also sprouted a large number of more reddish plants. This may suggest that the Revitalized Water allows plants with more chlorophyll to grow faster. Still, the plants in A were larger than the plants in B.

I got hold of some pH paper and decided that was something that needed to be tested. I first tested the Original Revitalized Water and the tap water. The Revitalized was .5 to 1 point more neutral than the tap water. Then I took some bottled water and compared it to the Revitalized Water. The bottled water was a lot more acidic than the Revitalized water. I ran the bottled water through the Revitalizer and the Revitalized bottled water was 2 to 2.5 points more basic. Yet, it still wasn't as basic as the Revitalized tap water. Another claim they had was that after a few months an egg in both Revitalized and tap water would start to stink, yet the Revitalized Water wouldn't stink as much. I put an egg in two glasses with both of the waters in it. But, instead of their idea, I would leave the eggs in the sun for only a week. Their claim was correct, the egg in the tap water's odor was much greater than the others.

Then, I tested the surface tension of the water. Surface tension is a thin "skin" that is on the top of water. This is how insects can stand and move on water. When soap is added to water, this is taken away and that is one reason why soap is more effective at cleaning than just plain water. One way I tested the surface tension of the water is to take an eye dropper and drop a single drop of water on a level table. The tap water drops and forms a nice symmetrical ball on the table (you can try this at home and see for yourself), then I dropped a ball of Revitalized Water on the same level table. The water dropped and ran everywhere, not in a tight ball like the tap water (you can also try this, if you don't have Revitalized Water, add some soap and see for yourself).

One claim Nordic had was that the water would remove icky coffee stains off a coffee pot if the water was added and left alone in the pot for a couple of months. I figured that any water left in the pot for a couple of months would clean it, so again I shortened a couple months down to three days. The water did seem to get a lot more stain off than the water the pot was just rinsed with.

Then there were the taste-tests. There is no doubt about it, the taste of the water is different. I decided to do a blind taste test to see about this theory, or if it was just a mental gimmick trying to steal our money. I gave two glasses of water the same temperature to two different people. The glass labeled A was tap, while B was Revitalized Water. Both people chose A as tap and B as the Revitalized.

The physical characteristics of this water can tell you that there is a difference in the water. I cannot tell what the strange little pipe does to the water. It either adds, takes something away, or changes the water. Since the H2O part cannot be changed, it has to deal with the other things in our water such as microscopic bacteria, calcium, chlorine and other such things added to our drinking water. I wish that I could have taken apart the water device to see if I could answer this, but since it cost around $150, I wasn't about to dive into destruction. Perhaps someone else is more willing.

This water is great for living things, such as plants and animals, but it may not be the answer to ALL of our problems.

Scott Ulrich is 14 years old and an eighth grader in Chadron, Nebraska. He spends his summers in Paonia, Colorado. You can visit his Web site, "What's Right With TV?" at http://members .tripod.com/~badtv/ (e-mail: hexdae@ hotmail.com).

To visit the Web site of Nordic Living Water Systems, go to http://www.alivewater.net, or e-mail Mikael Lund at info@alivewater.net.

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