The Periodic Table

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5:06 AM

Hi.

Been puzzling over the identity of an unknown chemical (if it exists) and thought I'd ask here, since it sounded as if it wouldn't be up to the standards of the main site.

I haven't got the chemical myself, it's an experiment that somebody on another site swears blind he's carried out, and other members of the same site say they've managed to replicate part but not all of.

According to the original description, he used a home-made set-up with stainless steel electrodes to run an electric current through water, producing small bubbles (which he thought were ozone rather than hydrogen and oxygen, but he didn't give any evidence for that). After five minutes the water and bubbles were emptied into a glass jar with a silicone seal and immediately sealed.

The jar was kept at 37 degrees C and over the next few days, the liquid turned white and shrank to roughly one-tenth of its volume (but didn't change in mass).

He described the properties of the resulting substance.
* Viscous (consistency described as "like poking your own stomach").
* High surface tension (didn't stick to a rubber glove).
* Highly corrosive (could eat through metals, and skin).
* Neutral pH.
* Density of roughly 500 g/50 ml.

That's a summary, there may be a few more details to be scratched out of his postings if anyone has further questions.
If it was just him, I might have ignored it as made up, but at least other members of the same site report that they've tried his process and got as far as getting the water to reduce in volume and increase in viscosity, though not to the drastic extent that he did.

It's possible that they all made it up, but still, out of curiosity, is there any reasonable chemical explanation for this?

5 hours later…