To what extent is water responsible for the maintenance of the life for warm-blooded organisms?

In this work, attention is mainly focused on those properties of water which are essentially changed in the physiological temperature range of warm-blooded organisms. Studying in detail the half-width of the diffusion peak in the quasi-elastic incoherent neutron scattering, the behavior of the entropy and the kinematic shear viscosity, it is shown that the character of the translational and rotational thermal motions in water radically change near T(H) ~ 315 K, which can be interpreted as the temperature of the smeared dynamic phase transition. These results for bulk pure water are completed by the analysis of the isothermic compressibility and the NMR-spectra for water-glycerol solutions. It was noted that the non-monotone temperature dependence of the isothermic compressibility (beta(T)) takes also place for the water-glycerol solutions until the concentration of glycerol does not exceed 30 mol%. At that, the minimum of beta(T) shifts at left when the concentration increases. All these facts give us some reasons to assume that the properties of the intracellular and extracellular fluids are close to ones for pure water. Namely therefore, we suppose that the upper temperature limit for the life of warm-blooded organisms [T(D) = (315 +/- 3) K] is tightly connected with the temperature of the dynamic phase transition in water. This supposition is equivalent to the assertion that the denaturation of proteins at T > or = T(H) is mainly provoked by the rebuilding of the H-bond network in the intracellular and extracellular fluids, which takes place at T > or = T(H). A question why the heavy water cannot be a matrix for the intracellular and extracellular fluids is considered. The lower physiological pH limit for the life of warm-blooded organisms is discussed.

Role of orientation disorder in the formation of fragility of glassy water and glycerol-like liquids.

The role of H bonds in the formation of the fragility and dielectric properties of highly viscous liquids is investigated. The heuristic supposition about the proportionality between the logarithm of the shear viscosity and oscillatory contributions to the mean-square displacement of a molecule is presented. Concrete calculations are carried out for the H-bond subsystem of the two-dimensional model lattice water. The conjecture on the interrelation between the phase transition in the subsystem of H bonds and the glassification point is formulated. It is shown that (i) the glassification temperature is proportional to the H-bonding energy and (ii) the fragilities of glycerol-like liquids differ from each other as a consequence of distinct interaction energies between H bonds. The existence of a close connection between the fragility parameter and dielectric permittivity is established.

Properties of the H-bond network for two-dimensional lattice water model.

A microscopic Hamiltonian of the hydrogen-bond network in two-dimensional lattice water is proposed, which describes the formation and disruption of the H bonds, their bending, and which satisfies the Bernal-Fowler rules [J. D. Bernal and R. H. Fowler, J. Chem. Phys. 1, 515 (1933)]. The thermodynamic properties of the H-bond network are studied using the method of many-particle irreducible distribution functions, which is a generalization of the Kikuchi cluster approach [R. Kikuchi, Phys. Rev. 81, 988 (1951)] and the Bethe-Peierls quasiactivities method [H. A. Bethe, Prog. R. Soc. A 150, 552 (1935)]. The temperature dependencies of the average number of H bonds per molecules, the contribution of the H bonds into the heat capacity of the system, and the parameters describing the correlations between the states of molecules on the neighboring sites are investigated. It is shown that depending on the magnitude of the interaction between the H bonds in the H-bond subsystem either smooth or sharp first-order phase transition can occur. The role of different factors in the formation of the properties of the H-bond network is discussed.

Temperature dependence of density, thermal expansion coefficient and shear viscosity of supercooled glycerol as a reflection of its structure.

The relationship of the microstructure of supercooled, highly viscous glycerol to the temperature dependence of its density, thermal expansion coefficient, and shear viscosity are discussed. The character of this temperature dependence at the transition from low viscosity state to the solid amorphous state (solidified state without nuclei) is described with help of function psi, which can be interpreted as the effective number of degrees of freedom responsible for the change of viscosity of glycerol over a broad range; these degrees of freedom are those related to the alpha-relaxation process. It is shown that the change in effective activation energy of the viscosity is completely determined by the parameter psi. The change in the shear viscosity of glycerol due to the influence of the solid-phase nuclei is considered. It is shown that the introduction of the parameter phi, equal to the specific volume occupied by the nuclei of the solid phase, together with psi provides a natural explanation of the temperature dependence of density and thermal expansion coefficients of glycerol in its liquid, solid amorphous, glassy, and crystal states. The peculiarities of the temperature dependence of phi(T) and psi(T) for glycerol and o-terphenyl are compared.