Did You Know? Hot water freezes faster than cold water.

 As humans, we tend to take the most important things in life for granted  and water makes no exception. Whether you drink it, wash with it or use  it for your plants, water use makes a great part of our daily routine.  But how much do we really know about water? 

 Hot water freezes faster than cold water.

Perhaps you have seen  some of those videos on Youtube where people throw hot water into the  air and it freezes instantly. In the world of science, that is called  the Mpemba effect and it basically means that hot water freezes faster than cold water. The effect was named after Erasto Batholomeo Mpemba, a Tanzanian who  observed the effect in 1963. While in cookery class, Mpemba noticed that  the mixture of ice cream that was hot froze faster than the mixture  that was cold. 

He later asked physics professor Dr. Denis G. Osborne  from the University College of Dar es Salaam about the effect, while  participating at his lecture. While, at first, he was laughed at by his  teacher, they ended up publishing his findings together in 1969. There have been many theories for the Mpemba effect, but none of them  stood, until recently. Most of them, such as water evaporating and  reducing volume left to freeze, impurities in the water that change its  freezing point or layers of frost insulating the water, have been  dismissed by experiments. In 2013, though, a team of researchers from  Nanyang Technological University in Singapore published a paper where  they proved that the effect was caused by hydrogen bonds being weaker in  warm water and allowing it to release energy much faster.