Writing into water? Scientists discover a way to do it using pen and ink

The researchers have collaborated to use water as the medium, with their special pen and ink dispersing its mark into the liquid, where it could depict a letter or image.

Researchers from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), TU Darmstadt, and Wuhan University have revealed their latest study which resulted in creating a revolutionary way of writing into water. According to the researchers, their method would have users writing directly into water, and no longer need a substrate or another medium submerged to do so.

One of the challenges here is that modern pens, for example, a fountain pen, can eject its ink into the water but its nib is large enough to create turbulence in the water, eradicating its traces.

With this, the team has devised a new instrument, an ion-exchange bead serving as a pen. "We have put the ink directly in the water and used a microbead made of ion-exchange material with a diameter of 20 to 50 microns as a writing instrument," explained Professor Thomas Palberg of JGU.

A Special Type of Pen and Ink is Needed

The special pen's bead is significantly small, and this in turn creates no vortices that destroy what a person tries to write into water.

"If the bead is rolled across the base of a water bath, it traces out an invisible track of lower pH in the liquid. This attracts the ink particles and they accumulate in the path marked out by the ball point," as explained by the researchers.

"The result is a fine line of just a few hundredth microns in width, marking out the area of the lowest pH value."

The team claimed that its research is only in the preliminary phase, and has already published these findings via the journal, Small.

Water is Life and How It Shaped Us

Water is one of the most important building blocks of life, and without it, the majority of living organisms here on the planet would not survive back then, until the present. Still, researchers are looking into where the Earth's water came from, and in a recent study, they were able to rule out that it did not come from meteorites that landed on the planet during ancient times.

The changing climate, Global Warming, and many irresponsible actions by humans have already threatened the water supply in the world, and many are looking to overturn it and preserve what we have left. Many companies have already pledged to save water supplies, with Microsoft pledging that by 2030, it would save as much as 5.7 billion liters per year to conserve it.

While water is long considered a medium of biology, researchers have devised a way to make it more of a communication or literature medium, now solving the centuries-old problem of writing into water.