Sunday, August 26, 2012

Human saliva has a boiling point three times that of regular water

Doesn't seem right.Human saliva is composed of 98% water while the other 2% consists of other compounds such as electrolytes, mucus, antibacterial compounds, and various enzymes.
If you assume that human saliva is approximately isotonic or equivalent to 0.154M NaCl, you could get an approximation of the boiling point by using the formula delta T = iKm where i is the vant Hoff number (2 for NaCl) and K is the constant for water (0.512) and m is the molality of the solution. Being too lazy to recalculate the molality and just using the molarity of 0.154 you would get the following: delta T = (2)(0.512)(0.154) = approximately 0.16 degrees. So the boiling point of saliva would be about 100.16 degrees centigrade instead of 100 degrees which is the boiling point of pure water. Hardly three times.

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