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Exclusion Zone (EZ) Water: Potential for Filtration and Electric Power

The following is the second part of an edited talk given by Gerald H. Pollack, PhD, professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, at the First International Conference on Science and God (ICSG I), in February 2020. In the latter half of his presentation, Prof. Pollack discusses the potential applications of exclusion zone (EZ) water upon explaining how EZ water responds to infrared light (see Part 1: The Earth & I, August 2023).


water bulb
©ddggg/iStock

The next question is, does the human body use light, internally?

I would submit that one possibility is that we receive this energy all the time from outside, all different wavelengths. Some of them get deeply absorbed. The first possibility of use that comes to mind is the cardiovascular system; the capillaries are pretty close to the surface of the skin. It could be that light comes in and helps propel the flow.

The problem is that in healthy, young adults the capillaries are 3 or 4 μm in diameter, and the red blood cells that need to pass through them are twice as wide, 6 or 7 μm in diameter. It takes energy to push them through. Russian scientists computed the amount of energy that would be required to do so. If the heart were fully responsible for doing this, they computed that the heart would need to generate something like one million times the pressure that it actually generates. They were searching for another mechanism to help drive the flow. They said it was absolutely necessary.

There is the problem of energy. They could not figure out where the energy was coming from, but there has to be another source of energy. Meanwhile, we had just finished these experiments in the lab showing that light—radiant energy—drives blood flow in tubes that resemble blood vessels. Capillaries are hydrophilic tubes. I started thinking that, maybe, it is possible that this is going on in our cardiovascular system. Our hypothesis was the extra energy that is needed is supplied by the EZ that lines the capillaries and supplies energy to drive the blood flow through.

Our hypothesis was the extra energy that is needed is supplied by the EZ that lines the capillaries and supplies energy to drive the blood flow through.

In a paper by an Israeli group, they sacrificed the mouse by clamping the aorta. Within ten seconds the heart stopped, the mouse was dead, but the blood kept flowing. It flowed at a much-reduced velocity, but it kept flowing for five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes, and more than an hour. The experiment was repeated in ten different mice and produced the same result.

How could it be that the heart was not pumping and the mouse was effectively dead, but the blood kept on flowing? We decided to test this hypothesis to see if the mechanism we saw in the laboratory was really working in the intact cardiovascular system.

My student, Li Zheng, chose the chick embryo. It was three days old but developed enough so that if you removed the top of the eggshell, you could see the embryo developing. You could image the blood vessels.

The blood flow velocity in the embryo increased during contact with infrared light.  ©Gerald Pollack/HJIFUS
The blood flow velocity in the embryo increased during contact with infrared light. ©Gerald Pollack/HJIFUS

The first part of the experiment was to stop the heart by injecting potassium chloride. Right away, it stopped. The graph shows what happened, plotting the velocity of blood flow versus time. The flow went way down to some low level, but not to zero. Then, the signature of the mechanism was tested—to turn on the infrared light and see if the blood flow increased.

The graph shows that the blood flow increased by about three times. When the light was

turned off, the flow went back down to the control level. On the basis of this kind of experiment, we think that the missing source of energy in driving the flow of blood in our cardiovascular system is exactly what I showed you: what we found in the laboratory—this so-called self-driven flow, which I think is occurring in all of us all the time.

So, you may ask, “Where do we get our energy?” We certainly get our energy from food, some people more than others, but we also get some energy from light. When you think of people who go without eating for very long periods of time and where they get their energy, I think that light is absorbed by the water inside our bodies, builds EZ, and gives us energy. This is a supplemental energy supply.

I think that light is absorbed by the water inside our bodies, builds EZ, and gives us energy. This is a supplemental energy supply.

I want to end with some practical applications. One of them is getting energy from water and sunlight. We know that we have a negative region and a positive region, and you can imagine if you simply put electrodes in the respective regions you ought to be able to get light out of it. We demonstrated that we can.


One potential application of EZ water is electricity production.  ©Gerald Pollack/HJIFUS
One potential application of EZ water is electricity production. ©Gerald Pollack/HJIFUS

In the above image, on the right are a dozen chambers with Nafion and water and pairs of electrodes. There is a switch in the middle, and behind a magnifier is an LED. The water is getting light energy, including ambient light. We think this has some potential to solve some of the world’s energy problems. We have begun to work on this and a couple other developments.

Another potential application of EZ water is water filtration.  ©Gerald Pollack/HJIFUS
Another potential application of EZ water is water filtration. ©Gerald Pollack/HJIFUS

The above image shows a water filtration system but without a physical filter, with the flow going in from the left. There is a Nafion tube or something similar, and it pushes all the contaminants toward the center line. An exclusion zone builds next to the wall of the Nafion tube. Then you have a so-called differential extractor, which is nothing more than two concentric tubes. The central tube collects the contaminants and dumps them. The peripheral tube collects the “filtered” water. Actually, it is EZ water, and you can see here we have been able to get a separation of 200 to 1 in a single pass. We are working to build this up to increase contaminant extraction even further.

One of the more exciting areas is removing salt from water. The idea is to introduce ocean water from one side of a tube and get rid of the salt from the other side. Dump out the salt and have fresh drinking water.

We use light; we do not discard it. None of the ideas of an exclusion zone, separation of charge (plus and minus), and the role of light, especially infrared, are currently in the chemistry books. So, if we are right, the interpretation of aqueous chemical reactions and many other things will need to be revised in chemistry textbooks.

In terms of health, EZ water fills our cells. In the book I wrote prior to this one, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life, I presented evidence that water plays an absolutely central and fundamental role in everything the cell does. If you want to hydrate yourself, you need to know something about the water content and how it works to convert into EZ water, or maybe it already is EZ water.


From the practical point of view, I mentioned filtration, desalination, and getting electricity from water. I will finish here with my latest book, The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor, which deals with these matters in much greater depth than I have been able to cover here.

 

*Gerald H. Pollack, PhD, is a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is also the executive director of The Institute for Venture Science.

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