What do the words ‘monatomic’, ‘diatomic’ and ‘nanoclusters magnesium’ mean?

Answer

Dear Miranda,

Magnesium is the element with atomic number 12 in the table of Mendeleev. (An alkaline earth, it is next to Sodium and below Berillium) When magnesium atoms in a solution occur as single atoms (or perhaps better said ions, being atoms that have 1 or more electrons extra or too short) you can refer to this as monoatomic . Mono is a prefix that comes from Greek and indicates here that the about 1 atom. If you want to count further, you can use di-(2), tri-(3), tetra-(4), penta-(5). With which we now also know what diatomic magnesium refers to: namely a molecule consisting of 2 magnesium atoms. On the latter, I must already point out that magnesium does not belong to the group of diatomic elements (such as hydrogen and nitrogen, these elements very easily form a diatomic molecule), so I would be very surprised that these are the molecules that occur in water ( it will rather be a hydride (being magnesium+hydrogen, MgH₂), oxide (being magnesium + oxygen; MgO) or hydroxide (Mg(OH)₂).

The nano-clusters are groups of atoms, where the size of such a group is on the order of a few nanometer is. Picture this as little clumps of a material: as you can see in this figure. These materials researchers simulated different sizes of magnesium clusters to accurately determine their shape. This is important to understand the properties of these clusters. We also see here that the length of a bond between 2 magnesium atoms is approximately 0.3 nanometers (although the researchers express the length in ngström, where 1 nanometer=10 Ångström). So clusters from 0.3 nanometers to 5 nanometers actually means all possible groups from 2 atoms to about 4500 atoms.

What such groups of magnesium atoms do in distilled water is quite simple: float around and occasionally exchange a hydrogen atom with the water.

Distilled water, is water (implied from the commercial from which the context comes) from which everything except the water molecules has been filtered out as much as possible (by distillation). This with a view to producing very pure water for chemical and physical experiments. This water is certainly not intended for consumption, since everything is missing why people should drink water: the minerals. Adding it back afterwards is quite ironic. The amount in question here is 35ppm (parts per million parts) which equates to ~50 milligrams/litre. Now let’s take a look at it drinking water in Flanders, we see that medium-hard drinking water can generally be found there, which can be seen as 36-72 milligrams/litre if the hardness were only due to magnesium.

In summary, for €0.05 tap water you probably get as much magnesium as for a bottle of specially produced distilled mineral water of €50-100, where you also have all other minerals for free with your tap water.

Regards,

Danny