Have you ever poured yourself a nice cool drink of water before bed, and woken up to a glass of, BLECH? !
In just a couple of hours, your refreshing water turned tepid and kinda. . . musty.
But why?
Well, we have a couple guesses about why water goes stale, and it's all about the chemistry.
Your drinking water isn't just a pure collection of H2O molecules.
It has a lot of other ions and molecules in it too, which can change over time and affect how the water tastes.
So let's first start with carbon dioxide.
It's the stuff you exhale, the stuff in soda that makes it fizzy, and that pesky gas that's making the oceans more acidic.
And your cup of water is, to some extent, like a tiny ocean.
Water is an excellent solvent, which means it's really good at dissolving lots of other substances, including gases, until it reaches equilibrium with the atmosphere.
