Follow the Electric Rabbit

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Honestly, this piece should probably be called "Follow the Electric Salamander," since a salamander is the real star of the opening act. It just doesn't have the same ring. So the rabbit gets top billing, and the salamander gets the first scene.

Every living thing you have ever touched is humming with electricity. Not the kind that runs through the walls of your house, but a quieter kind: tiny voltages across cell membranes, charged surfaces where water meets protein, currents measured in millionths of an amp. Some thinkers have started calling this way of looking at life "atomic." Instead of stopping at organs or even cells, it zooms in to electrons, charge and the shape of water molecules.

It's a big, beautiful idea, and a rabbit hole worth falling into. Follow it far enough and you'll meet a surprising cast of characters: a salamander, a forester, two brothers squeezing crystals, a bioengineer watching water, and a molecule from a paper mill. Here's where the electric rabbit leads.

The Salamander's Secret

Illustration of a spotted salamander glowing with electric blue light on a mossy rock in a night forest, lightning arcing beneath it and a faint hexagon pattern in the sky. — Robert O. Becker measured the electrical signals at salamander and frog wounds and found they followed different patterns.

When a salamander loses a leg, it grows a new one — bones, toes and all — with the calm of an animal that has done this before, because it has. A frog, its fellow amphibian, can't. In the mid-twentieth century, orthopedic surgeon Robert O. Becker set out to understand why, which is the kind of question a surgeon asks once he's grown tired of telling patients "we'll cast it and hope."

Becker measured the electrical activity at the injury sites of both animals and found that they behaved differently. As regrowth got underway, the voltage at the salamander's wound went through a distinctive shift. The frog's followed a different pattern, and its wound simply closed over with scar tissue — nature's duct tape: strong, quick, and incurious. Becker proposed that living tissue carries a steady direct-current signal that helps organize growth and repair. He shared the idea with general readers in his 1985 book The Body Electric, written with Gary Selden.

Several of Becker's broader theories were ahead of their time, and some are still being explored. His central hunch — that electrical signals help guide how tissues grow and take shape — has grown into a lively field. Today developmental biologists such as Michael Levin at Tufts University study "bioelectric" patterns in frogs, flatworms and other creatures, in some cases flipping a cell's electrical state and changing what the animal grows. The salamander knew something all along; we're just now getting it on the record.

Water's Strange Four Degrees

Most substances get denser as they get colder, because that is what physics asks of them. Water breaks the rule at the door. Liquid water is at its densest at about 4°C (39°F), and below that it starts to expand again. That's why ice floats, and why lakes freeze from the top down, leaving a layer of 4-degree water near the bottom where fish can wait out the winter instead of becoming fishcicles. Your iced drink gets diluted; the food chain survives. On balance, a decent trade.

That quirk fascinated Viktor Schauberger, an Austrian forester of the early 1900s who spent years watching mountain streams the way other men watched horse races. He noticed that cold water seemed to carry heavy logs more easily, and he designed timber flumes that made use of cool temperatures and the curving, spiraling paths water takes in nature. He went on to develop many ideas about "living" water that science has yet to take up and test. His patient attention to how water actually moves continues to inspire naturalists and tinkerers. There are worse ways to spend a career than staring at a creek.

Illustration of water molecules floating above a dark forest stream beside a glowing snowflake and a hexagonal ice lattice, linked by small sparks of electricity. — Liquid water is densest near 4°C. When it freezes, its molecules lock into six-sided rings.

Part of what makes water so unusual is its geometry. When it freezes, its molecules lock into a hexagonal lattice: each oxygen links to its neighbors through hydrogen bonds, forming open, six-sided rings. Every snowflake is that six-fold symmetry written large enough to see — the only diagram nature mails you for free.

Squeeze a Crystal, Get a Spark

Illustration of a clear quartz crystal pressed between two rocks under a starry sky, crackling with blue electric sparks and a hexagonal pattern inside. — Piezoelectricity, discovered by Pierre and Jacques Curie in 1880: press on a quartz crystal and a small voltage appears.

Hexagons turn up again in quartz, which grows as six-sided columns. In 1880 the brothers Pierre and Jacques Curie discovered that squeezing certain crystals, quartz among them, produces a small voltage across them. The effect came to be called piezoelectricity, from the Greek word for "press." It also works in reverse: apply a voltage and the crystal flexes, ever so slightly, like a very disciplined muscle.

That two-way trick is now all around us. A sliver of quartz vibrating at a precise rate keeps time in wristwatches and helps radios, computers and phones stay in step. The most precise clock in your house may well be a squeezed rock.

Living tissue has a version of its own. In the 1950s, Japanese researchers Eiichi Fukada and Iwao Yasuda reported that dry bone produces small voltages when it is bent, an effect tied to its collagen. Becker drew on findings like these, and some researchers have proposed that the ordinary pressures of moving, stretching and breathing keep up a low-level electrical chatter in connective tissue — your body, softly discussing itself. How much that matters in a living body is a question this young field is just beginning to explore, which is science's polite way of saying "more grants, please."

A Fourth Phase of Water?

At the University of Washington, bioengineer Gerald Pollack has spent years on a deceptively simple experiment. He places a water-loving surface, such as a gel or a polymer called Nafion, in water filled with tiny suspended beads, then watches under a microscope. A clear band forms along the surface as the beads are pushed away, like a bouncer with a very small guest list. Pollack named it the exclusion zone, or EZ.

Illustration of a glowing hexagonal layer of structured water forming along a gel-like surface, with bubbles drifting into ordinary water and warm light shining from above. — Gerald Pollack's exclusion zone: a bead-free band that forms beside water-loving surfaces. How to interpret it is an active, emerging area of research.

He reports that this zone can grow to a fraction of a millimeter wide, that it carries a negative charge while the water just beyond it carries a positive one, and that it expands under infrared light. In his 2013 book The Fourth Phase of Water, he proposes that EZ water is an ordered, liquid-crystalline state built from stacked hexagonal sheets, somewhere between ice and ordinary liquid. If that's right, he suggests, the water lining every surface inside a cell might behave a little like a battery, with sunlight helping to keep it charged. Your cells, quietly solar-powered — a pleasant thought, and one this emerging field is still working out.

Pollack's work stands on older shoulders. Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Nobel laureate best known for his vitamin C research, spent much of his later career arguing that the structure of water and the movement of electrons are central to understanding life. He was the sort of man who suspected a cell was less a bag of chemicals and more a piece of wet electronics.

Worth knowing: the "fourth phase" interpretation is still taking shape. Many physicists and chemists agree that exclusion zones form, and some propose that familiar chemistry, such as ion gradients set up at the surface, may explain them without a new phase of water. Others have pushed the water story further, for example proposing that the balance between ordinary hydrogen and its heavier form, deuterium (which carries a neutron alongside its proton), affects how water behaves in cells. Those ideas sit even further out on the frontier. Wonder and careful questions ride down the rabbit hole together.

A Molecule from the Pulp Mill

That brings us to an unassuming chemical with a long name: dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO. It's a small molecule, a single sulfur atom bonded to an oxygen and two methyl groups. The Russian chemist Alexander Zaytsev first prepared it in the 1860s, and for decades it was a laboratory curiosity — cheap, clear, and thoroughly unglamorous.

Illustration of a glowing ball-and-stick model of dimethyl sulfoxide, with a yellow sulfur atom bonded to a red oxygen and two carbon methyl groups, floating above vintage lab glassware and a desk lamp. Small arcs of electricity come off the oxygen end. — Dimethyl sulfoxide, (CH₃)₂SO. Its strongly lopsided sulfur–oxygen bond gives it a powerful electrical dipole.

From the 1940s on, industry found it to be an exceptional solvent, and by around 1960 papermakers were producing it in quantity from lignin, the woody material left over when trees are pulped for paper. Chemists describe DMSO as "polar aprotic." Its sulfur-oxygen bond is strongly lopsided in charge, which gives the molecule a powerful electrical dipole, yet unlike water it has no hydrogen available for hydrogen bonding. That combination lets it dissolve an unusually wide range of substances and mix freely with water. A molecule that comes from trees and dissolves nearly everything — the paper mill's revenge on filing cabinets everywhere.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Stanley Jacob, a surgeon at the University of Oregon Medical School who was working on preserving organs for transplant, teamed up with Robert Herschler, a chemist at a Pacific Northwest paper company. British researchers had already found that DMSO protects cells from damage during freezing, and laboratories still use it that way today. Jacob and Herschler noticed something else: the molecule passes through skin and membranes with remarkable ease, as if skin were a rumor. People who worked with it also noticed a telltale garlic-like taste minutes later — the molecule introducing itself, to you and everyone within conversational range.

Their findings made headlines in 1963 and set off a rush of research that has continued for decades. In 1978 the FDA approved a 50 percent solution for use in people, for a bladder condition called interstitial cystitis. Since then, DMSO has remained a subject of steady scientific curiosity, studied by chemists, cell biologists and physicians alike.

Why did researchers find it so intriguing? Partly for the very themes running through this piece. A small, strongly charged molecule that slips through membranes and interacts intensely with water raises fascinating questions about how charge, water and biological surfaces fit together. Some researchers have proposed that it might influence the kind of structured water layers Pollack describes, an idea that is still being explored — a genuinely open and interesting question.

Holding the Wonder Lightly

These ideas sit at different stages. The Curies' piezoelectricity, water's 4-degree anomaly and DMSO's unusual chemistry are textbook science, and the existence of bioelectric signals in growing tissue is well established. Pollack's fourth phase, Schauberger's living water, and claims that acupuncture meridians follow lines of lower electrical resistance are newer ground: part of an emerging field without much precedent yet, and pieces like this one are part of how it gets built. You can find every one of them fascinating while keeping track of which are textbook and which are still being worked out. The rabbit hole is worth the trip; bring a flashlight and enjoy the view.

What ties them together is a change in perspective. Instead of seeing life only as chemistry — molecules bumping into molecules — these thinkers invite us to see charge, geometry and water as part of the picture too. A salamander's leg, a snowflake, a quartz watch and a solvent from a paper mill turn out to have more in common than you might expect.

So that's the electric rabbit, and the trail keeps going. When you first learned that living things run on tiny electrical signals, what surprised or delighted you most?

Conscious Health Community

Follow the Electric Rabbit

The Salamander's Secret

Water's Strange Four Degrees

Squeeze a Crystal, Get a Spark

A Fourth Phase of Water?

A Molecule from the Pulp Mill

Holding the Wonder Lightly

Further Reading

Water as a fourth phase: Pollack's work and the wider conversation

Ordinary water: the textbook science

Szent-Györgyi: the actual books and papers

DMSO: history, approved use, chemistry

Deuterium: an emerging water question

Bioelectricity after Becker

Frontier threads: meridians and Schauberger

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