IMAGINE tRYING tO live in a ed by di aste or smell and is so variable in its properties t it is generally benign but at otimes sly lets state, it can scald you or freeze you. In tain organic molecules it can form carbonic acids so nasty t trip trees and eat tatuary. In bulk, ed, it can strike no and. Even for to live , it is anoften murderous substance. e call it er.

    ater is everyo is 80 percent er, a co, a bacterium 75percent. A tomato, at 95 percent, is little but er. Even  er,making us more liquid t to one. ater is strange stuff. It isformless and transparent, and yet o be beside it. It aste and yet aste of it. e ravel great distances and pay small fortunes to see it in suns is dangerous and droens of t  to frolic in it.

    Because er is so ubiquitous end to overlook raordinary substance it is.

    Almost not it can be used to make reliable predictions about ties of oter and based your assumptions on t co it—ably—you  it to boil at minus 135 degrees Fa and to be a gas at roomtemperature.

    Most liquids  by about 10 percent. ater does too, but only doo apoint. Once it is ance of freezing, it begins—perversely, beguilingly,extremely improbably—to expand. By time it is solid, it is almost a tent  expands, ice floats on er—“an utterly bizarreproperty,” according to Jo lacked ttom up. it surface ice to  in,ter’s e a even cing yet more ice.

    Soon even t certainly stay t ime,probably forever—ions to nurture life. ter seemsunary or laws of physics.