Salts, minerals and electrolytes - how they work in the quantum realm.

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Understanding the origins of the specific ion effects that underpin our day to day lives allows for more control of ourselves and the surrounding environment. It’s like knowing the rules for a game. To truly master it, you need to know the rules, then be able to use them in conjunction to your advantage. It’s also a bit like having a road map that can help you reach your destination quicker because you know which routes are the shortest and straightest. Having the rulebook, or roadmap, of specific ion effects will expedite endeavours in multiple industries. Over 50% of all pharmaceutical drugs exist as salts, implying many initial drug discovery programs would benefit, accelerating the search for life-saving drugs in this trillion-dollar industry. Nutritional epidemiology studies the role of diet on health and disease. It is heavily reliant on statistics of the population, but the specific ion effect rulebook could help bring understanding to a personalised level. Additionally, with the emergence of smart solutions and surfaces, the ability to tune these via salt will broaden the scope of their applicability, whilst also informing us of similar mechanistic processes happening in our bodies. With the emergence of electric vehicles (EVs), the battery race is gaining speed (pun intended). These EVs are reliant on the battery (and/or capacitors, supercapacitors and fuel cell) technology to go the fastest, farthest and be the smallest, whilst charging quickly and repeatedly. Inherently, these are reliant on specific ion effects for optimising how much flowing charge you can pack in a small space. So they’re important for “bettery” development if you will. Finally, EVs are one of the combatants of climate change. Another combatant to global warming is the glaciers at the ice caps that reflect a lot of the suns radiation. And guess what… Their stability is also dependent on specific ion effects. As is the stability of soil that might determine its disposition to erosion. So yes, specific ion effects affect almost all aspects of our lives, and while this study didn’t quite finish the specific ion effects rulebook, it did find a very important rule – The Electrostatic Origins of Specific Ion Effects.

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