Polywater

Polywater was a proposed form of water that reportedly had unusual properties, such as being able to penetrate nuclear waste containers and exhibit superconductivity. The concept was first introduced in the 1960s, and was widely publicized in the media and scientific literature.

Research on polywater was conducted by Soviet chemist Nikolai Fedyakin and a team of scientists at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. They claimed to have discovered a new form of water that had a different crystal structure than regular water, and that it exhibited remarkable properties such as being able to neutralize ionizing radiation and showing low friction coefficients.

In the early 1970s, scientists in the US and UK began to investigate polywater, and several reproducibility experiments were conducted. However, none of these experiments were able to consistently reproduce the original results claimed by Fedyakin and his team. Despite the lack of evidence, many scientists and media outlets continued to report on polywater as a possible explanation for various natural phenomena, such as the supposed existence of a "super-strain of water" in a silica mine in Sweden.

In 1974, a panel of experts convened by the American Chemical Society concluded that polywater was "essentially a legend", and had no basis in reality. Since then, research on polywater has been widely discredited, and it is now generally regarded as a pseudoscientific concept.