Everyone kno er’s c it consists of onelargisom taco it. tomscling fiercely to t, but also make casual bonds er molecules.

    ture of a er molecule means t it engages in a kind of dance ermolecules, briefly pairing and tners in a quadrille,to use Robert Kunzig’s nice per may not appear terribly lively, but everymolecule in it is cners billions of times a second. t’s ick togeto form bodies like puddles and lakes, but not so tig t be easilyseparated as o a pool of t any given moment only 15percent of tually touching.

    In one sense trong—it is s on a car ermination to beadners. It is also  ttracted more poo to tes a sort of membrane strong enougo support insects andskipping stones. It is ing to a belly flop.

    I  out t   it. Deprived of er, t. itated, to s lengtracts around to prevent blinking.”

    ater is so vital to us t it is easy to overlook t all but t fraction of teron Earto us—deadly poisonous—because of ts .

    e need salt to live, but only in very small amounts, and seaer contains  seventy times more—salt tabolize. A typical liter of seaer ain only about 2.5 teaspoons of common salt—t mucs of ots, compounds, and otively knos. tions of ts and minerals in our tissues isuncannily similar to seaer— and cry seaer, as Margulis and Sagan it—but curiously  tolerate t. take a lot of salt into your body andyour metabolism very quickly goes into crisis. From every cell, er molecules ruseer firemen to try to dilute and carry off take of salt. t of ter to c