On a lovely Saturday morning on 14th of this month in Irving, Texas, I was at a martial arts competition. I saw a booth right next to the restrooms in the main venue of the competition. See photo below.

At first glance my mind played a trick on me. I thought they were selling mercury. You know, the liquid metal at room temperature, mercury? It goes by the symbol hg from Hydrargyrum, an archaic term for it. But I was glad to realize that this isn’t the symbol for that poisonous metal at all but stands for a molecule, which all my lost years learning chemistry were informing me wasn’t simply possible. Nine hydrogen atoms forming a molecular bond. This “water” is supposed to super-hydrate us and provide us energy. The thinking may be something like this: “More hydrogen, more will be the hydration.”

 I find prices too prohibitive at these venues. So, I chose to pass up on it.

In the last issue of Cause & Effect, we told you about a joint statement signed onto by 48 fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which called upon the news media to stop referring to those who refuse to accept the reality of climate change (such as Sen. James Inhofe, pictured here) as “skeptics,” and instead call them what they are: “science deniers.” Well, they heard us, and there’s been a swell of coverage of the statement, sparking analysis and debate throughout the media.

Paragraph taken from an article from December 2014 CSI newsletter, Cause & Effect.