Computational study supports theory that water has a second critical point

An image showing a glass of water and its shadow

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Liquid-liquid phase transition at deeply supercooled conditions could explain water’s distinctive behavior

Water – the most important liquid in the universe – is also one of the strangest. Perhaps its best-known oddity is its decrease in density on freezing, but there are countless others. In 1992, Eugene Stanley and colleagues at Boston University in the US proposed that these properties could be explained if water at ambient temperature was a mixture of two indistinguishable liquids. Now, researchers using more sophisticated models have gained additional theoretical evidence to support this hypothesis.