What is the Potential of Solid State Heavy Water in Concrete and Starches?

[pzona]

This isn't so much a question, just something I thought was interesting. I met with my peer mentor last week and she's doing research which has lead to the discovery of solid state D_{2}O in concrete, starches, and cellulose (all at STP). She's not sure where this is going to lead or what applications this will have, if any, but I just thought it was strange. Has anyone heard of any other research on this type of thing? I'm curious to hear some thoughts on where this might go, or whether or not this has type of research has been done before.

EDIT: I don't know why, but the LATEX subscripts haven't been working for me. I figure everyone should understand what I mean since it's in the title, but the D2O I was referring to is heavy water.

 

[alxm]

Define 'solid state'. You mean amorphous hydrogen-bonded networks around the hydroxyl groups, etc? IOW: A kind of 'ice' around the macromolecules? I don't quite see what'd be news about that?

What exactly are they claiming to have discovered?

(And how is it different from, e.g.: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0921-4526(98)01497-5" )

 

[pzona]

From what I can tell, it's amorphous H-bonds forming around the OH groups. Also, I may have made a mistake when I said discovery. I'm not sure whether they're claiming what they're working on is anything new, but I hadn't heard of this before, although I'm by no means well read in recent chemistry research. My peer mentor did a sort of graduation project on this, and I'm not sure whether it had to be necessarily ground breaking, which after looking at your link, it seems this isn't. I'll ask her for more details, as I only talked to her briefly about it.