“WATER is very strange,” says Anders Nilsson. He should know: he has been studying the stuff for most of his working life. His claim may be hard for the rest of us to swallow – after all, what could be more ordinary than water? Its behaviour is so familiar, its appearance so commonplace, that we are tricked into assuming that it is more or less the same as everything else. But water is uniquely weird . If it weren’t, none of us would be here to notice. For example, if water weren’t densest at around 4°C rather than as ice, lakes and rivers would freeze from the bottom up, slowly killing their inhabitants. If it weren’t so spectacularly good at absorbing heat, the planet would have boiled over long ago. And if its molecules, barrelling through membranes or darting down veins, weren’t so good […]