I Was Wrong About Structured Water

Dear Readers,
 You and our Leading Edge Clinic patients make up the entire customer base of the Asao Group to this point. The broader world has yet to discover Themarox or Shimanishi, at least until the books are out, and in the meantime, you’ve kept us more than busy!
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 The Structured Water Question
 After seven months chasing minerals through water chemistry, geohydrology, origin-of-life science, and old biophysics papers, I’ve arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: I can’t prove that structured water exists, but I also can’t dismiss it. What follows is the evidence, so you can decide where you land.
 I think the reader deserves a fair tour of why the structured-water idea refuses to die, why so many serious scientists have proposed it for over 100 years, and why I eventually had to leave that phrase behind without entirely leaving the question.
 The Example of Ice
 The safest place to begin is with something utterly uncontroversial: ice. No one in water chemistry can dispute that, under most conditions, when water freezes, its molecules arrange themselves into a highly ordered crystalline lattice, a stable, repeating architecture driven by polarity and hydrogen bonding. That matters because it establishes the first principle cleanly. Water is not some chemically indifferent fluid incapable of order. It carries within its molecular design the capacity to organize.
 But ice does not solve the real question, and in some ways it distracts from it. Biology cannot run inside a rigid crystal as metabolism requires mobility, exchange, diffusion, slippage, collision, and all the molecular untidiness of liquid life.
 Bulk Water: Organized Chaos
 Imagine you could peer into a glass of pure liquid water and watch the individual molecules interacting with one another. What you would see would be astonishingly dynamic. Water molecules continuously form and break hydrogen bonds with neighboring molecules at the rate of hundreds of billions of times per second , and although they often adopt tetrahedral arrangements for brief moments, those structures are so short-lived that thermal motion tears them apart almost as quickly as they appear. Clusters form and dissolve almost instantly, and the best description of the whole scene is probably “organized chaos.”
 That, more or less, is the baseline state of liquid water: a rapidly shifting hydrogen-bond network with fleeting local arrangements and no durable large-scale order. And if that were all water ever was, the structured-water question would never have become a question in the first place. But of course, that is not all water ever is.
 Minerals Bringing Order To Water: Hydration Shells
 OK, so I have to admit that I just played a trick on you. I had you imagine a glass containing only water molecules, which is to say a liquid that does not exist in nature outside laboratory conditions or with devices, such as ultrapure, distilled, or reverse-osmosis water. My bad. It is almost as if I believed that water without minerals is biologically active. It is not.
 Add minerals back in, and the picture changes immediately. The moment a charged ion dissolves, nearby water molecules orient themselves around it, forming what chemists call hydration shells. I think of them as fans crowding around a celebrity—the closest press in tightly and most orderly, while those farther out remain influenced but more loosely arranged.
 This is not a crystal and certainly not a frozen lattice, but it is a real pocket of local order created by mineral charge. The molecules remain in motion, the “fans” constantly exchanging places, but a general, albeit focal, structure persists through dynamic electrostatic relationships. When minerals enter the system, water does not stop being dynamic—it becomes dynamic around centers of organization. That is already more structure than one finds in demineralized water, though still far from the crystalline order of ice.
 Water At The Border - Interfacial Water
 The next level of order appears when water encounters a surface. Here, it becomes even more organized than in hydration shells, as electrostatic forces pull molecules into preferred orientations near charged or polar interfaces—membranes, mineral lattices, clays, proteins, while slowing their motion.
 We are still on safe ground. Interfacial water is well established. Spectroscopic work confirms that water adjacent to mineral surfaces—such as those near my now-favorite pet rock, biotite—becomes more ordered than bulk water. The limitation, as water chemists insist, is that this ordering extends only a few nanometers, on the order of ten molecular layers.
 Think of a Tokyo subway platform: the first row is highly organized, the second is still influenced, and farther out, you return to the chaotic movement of the crowd. That is interfacial water. The edge imposes order without freezing the system.
 The Long Line of Structured Water Thinkers
 Come with me now as we venture into the areas of “structured” water chemistry where assertions reach no consensus, and opinions on both sides get heated (you would think that water chemists are a boring bunch, but if you read the papers closely, it gets vicious (OK, OK, so I am over-injecting drama here, big deal).
 But let’s start with the fact that far before the modern debates, for more than a century, scientists of the highest distinction, from very different fields, have asserted, in one language or another, that under certain conditions, the more organized behavior of interfacial water extends beyond the narrow layer recognized by classical surface chemistry.
 Despite several leading, and in some cases, Nobel Prize–winning scientists proposing versions of the idea, to this day, no consensus exists on whether such states exist in the broader sense claimed or even on their biological importance. (Recall that “scientific consensus” is a trigger word for me).
 If I were to give a full history of every study, lineage, and theoretical detour in this field, we would disappear into the weeds for far too long. So, let me try to keep it brief.
 It all started with the Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who suggested that water forms an active matrix within living systems, capable of supporting electronic and energetic organization around proteins.
 It genuinely brought a smile to my face to come across Szent-Györgyi here. I had the same reaction months earlier when, during my dive into mineral science, I ran into two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling and that now-famous line often attributed to him:
 “You can trace every sickness, every disease, and every ailment to a mineral deficiency.”
 Why do I get a little thrill when names like Szent-Györgyi and Pauling show up in these corners of science?
 My long-time readers can probably guess. My life—and, frankly, my career—collided with my dear friend and colleague Paul Marik through our shared fascination with the profound effects of IV vitamin C in severe sepsis. That path led us straight into COVID, and with it came… well, everything that followed—loss of jobs, careers, board certifications, and even our marriages.
 What many of you may not know is that Szent-Györgyi won the Nobel Prize for discovering vitamin C, while Pauling was relentlessly criticized for promoting its therapeutic efficacy in cancer. Small world, right?
 I continue to find it fascinating that the same names keep appearing in these seemingly distant corners of medicine and science that I keep wandering into. And no, before anyone gets carried away, I am not placing myself in the company of Nobel laureates, but, in a twist I still find surreal, I leave tomorrow for Japan for the first time in my life, where one of the highlights of the trip will be a personal invitation from Nobel Prize winner Professor Satoshi Ōmura, the discoverer of ivermectin, to tour the Kitasato Institute and share dinner with him and his colleagues.
 I can tell you already, it will be one of the highlights of my life. I will never forget the kindness he showed me during Covid, when he reached out at a time I was at my lowest, sending a letter and a beautiful spectrograph of the bacteria Streptomyces Avermectin, a gift that, quite honestly, helped restore a level of strength and determination I might not have otherwise regained.
 On top of that, I’ll be meeting with the executives of the Shimanishi-Kaken company and touring the only facility in the world that produces Themarox from biotite-derived vermiculite. Not a bad week.
 Meanwhile, Lisa has been thoroughly entertained by watching me learn from YouTube videos about the three types of bows used in Japan. Apparently, the angle matters depending on who you’re greeting. If you wait until the end of this post, I will share the video she took of my lesson with her. But suffice it to say, I’ve also been consulting AI extensively on Japanese dining etiquette and conversation customs.
 Because anyone who knows me knows this: I require serious training if I’m going to avoid playing the loud, overly boisterous American.
 Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, a few decades after Szent-Györgyi, the biophysicist Gilbert Ling proposed that intracellular water exists in a more ordered state associated with protein surfaces, formalizing the idea in his association–induction hypothesis. Around the same time, the surface chemist Boris Derjaguin demonstrated experimentally that water adjacent to solid materials, including mica and other mineral lattices, forms structured interfacial layers with properties distinct from bulk liquid water.
 Later, the Italian physicist Emilio Del Giudice introduced a theoretical framework suggesting that water might organize into coherent domains through electromagnetic coupling. Taken together, these scientists were not saying exactly the same thing, but they were all, in their own language, pushing against the idea that liquid water should always be treated as a simple, chaotic, structureless medium.
 Enter Gerald Pollack
 Which brings us to the work of Professor Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington. Pollack credits his interest in the subject to reading Gilbert Ling, and his exclusion-zone experiments can be understood as a modern extension of Ling’s long-running line of inquiry into whether water in biological systems behaves differently from bulk liquid.
 What Pollack reported was the discovery of relatively large regions of water adjacent to hydrophilic surfaces in which particles and solutes were excluded, an observation that implied that the water molecules within that region had adopted a more ordered arrangement than the surrounding bulk liquid. In other words, something about proximity to a surface appeared to reorganize the water in a way that fundamentally changed its behavior.
 These regions, which he called “exclusion zones,” were not just small boundary effects. He reported that they extended roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times farther than the nanometer-scale interfacial layers traditionally described by surface chemistry. That claim alone was enough to turn heads, and, predictably, to attract a small but enthusiastic horde of detractors within the water chemistry community. Science, after all, has its own immune system, and it tends to react when something new shows up that it didn’t generate itself.
 Pollack’s experiments were also visually striking, which matters more than most scientists would like to admit. He was able to literally show these zones forming and expanding under the microscope. Because he named the phenomenon in a way that people could understand, the idea began to spread beyond the lab. He reported that EZ water carried a net negative charge, while the adjacent bulk water carried a positive charge, effectively creating a region of charge separation, a kind of stored potential energy within the system.
 Even more intriguing, when infrared light was applied, the exclusion zone expanded. Others observed that healthier cells appeared to contain more of this EZ-like water, while damaged or dying cells contained less, and Pollack himself reported that certain toxins caused the zone to shrink. The implication, never stated too bluntly, but always hovering nearby, was that the amount of this organized water might correlate with biological health.
 From there, Pollack made a bold interpretive leap. He proposed that these regions represented a distinct, previously unrecognized phase of water, a “fourth phase,” somewhere between liquid and solid, almost gel-like, in which water molecules were organized into stacked sheets forming a repeating lattice. He titled his book The Fourth Phase of Water , and from that moment on, the language took on a life of its own.
 And, as tends to happen, it didn’t stay confined to the laboratory. The concept migrated, first into broader scientific curiosity, then into wellness culture, then into device marketing, and finally into all the familiar corners where incomplete science becomes a commercial opportunity. You can probably guess the rest.
 One of the most important experimental findings in Pollack’s work was that EZ water could be identified by a characteristic ultraviolet absorption peak at around 270 nanometers . That was his proposed signature. Fine. But then, in interviews and public talks, he began to mention that similar spectral features could be found in certain natural waters, particularly pristine mountain spring waters, with some showing more pronounced peaks than others.
 Now, whether intentional or not, that suggestion carried implications. It subtly suggested that some waters might be inherently more “organized” and therefore more biologically beneficial than others. Predictably, that idea didn’t stay theoretical for long. An entire industry of devices emerged, claiming to “structure” water using magnets, fields, vortices, or various energetic inputs, often without, I should note, providing clear evidence that their treated water actually exhibited the very 270 nm signature Pollack had identified as central. That detail, as you will see later, becomes quite important.
 Stepping back, I found Pollack’s body of work genuinely compelling. His findings around exclusion, charge separation, infrared responsiveness, and potential biological relevance were not hand-wavy, they were observed, tested, and published. One of the more striking claims was that this charge separation could even contribute to capillary flow independent of cardiac pumping, with experiments suggesting sustained movement under certain conditions. That is not a trivial observation.
 After reviewing his work and learning about a conversation my colleague Matt Bakos had with him, I have no issue with the phenomenon he described. Where my questions began was not with what he observed, but with the conditions under which those observations were made, and whether those conditions reflected the way water actually exists in the real world.
 The Opposition
 Pollack’s critics, to be fair, have offered many alternative explanations for exclusion-zone behavior, attributing it to well-understood concepts such as diffusion gradients, surface charge effects, diffusiophoresis, and the specific chemistry of the materials used.
 I take those seriously. But what left me unconvinced was the lack of a single elegant counter-explanation that accounted for the whole set of observations in a way that was more coherent than Pollack’s own. Different rebuttals seemed to be deployed for different pieces of the phenomenon.
 That does not vindicate Pollack’s strongest claims, and I do not need it to. It merely suggests that interfacial water, mineralized water, and electrochemical surface behavior remain more interesting than the dismissive crowd would like them to be.
 Ultimately, I think of Pollack’s novel insights like any other in science, they pass through three stages: first, they are observed, then they are argued over, and only later—if they survive—are they explained well enough to be accepted. The truth is that Pollack’s ideas, at the time of this writing, are still stuck in the second stage.
 Where Shimanishi Convinced Me Even Further
 Despite that, after wading through all the controversy and debate in really dense water chemistry papers, I was still left with the impression that something real was being observed. Still, the interpretation remained so unsettled that I decided to stop making any more assertions about structured water.
 But then, as I was about to leave the subject for good, I was drawn back in when I noticed uncanny parallels between Shimanishi's numerous claims and findings, which not only predated Pollack by a decade but also almost completely mirrored them.
 I also realized an important distinction: Shimanshi’s observations did not arise from working with synthetic Nafion tubes and injected microbubbles; he was working in the real world, with real water, not lab water.
 Despite this difference, the more I looked, the more intriguing overlaps I noticed. Pollack maintained that exclusion-zone water showed a characteristic UV absorption peak around 270 nanometers. Themarox-treated water, when tested both in Pollack’s laboratory and independently, showed the same peak.
 UV Spectrometer Analysis Of Water Treated With A Themarox-Derived Solution
 In the below, the absorption of Themarox-treated water was compared to both regular tap water and “Ultrapure” water (a completely de-ionized (zero mineral content) water.
 A critical detail is that the treated water sat in the lab for 6 days prior to the test .

 In the above, you can see the long “hold” where UV absorption is occurring in the 6-day-old mineral-treated water. In the tables below, note the sulfated mineral-treated water showing 95% absorption at 270 nm compared to the 15% absorption in tap water, and 0% in Ultrapure water:

 The coincidence was too specific to dismiss casually.
 Then the parallels widened. Pollack claimed that EZ water excluded suspended particles and solutes from the organized region; Themarox-treated water, when added to ordinary modern water, rapidly promotes aggregation, separation, and settling of suspended material, leaving the overlying water visibly clearer. The conventional explanation is easy; classical flocculation, which may be entirely sufficient to account for the result, as it is well known that multivalent ions destabilize colloids.
 But what caught my attention was that Shimanishi, long before Pollack, described his treated water as reorganized into smaller water clusters of H₃O₂ , exactly like Pollack described EZ water clusters, and Shimanishi also claimed that, based on this organization, it further allowed his treated water to expel solutes and particles from solution.
 Shimanishi supported his claim not with UV absorption but with results from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) testing, which he interpreted as representing unique hydrogen-bond dynamics.
 Weird right?
 Shimanishi arrives at this conclusion by himself, using “real,”, “natural”, mineral-treated water samples and then, 10-15 years later, a guy named Pollack in a research lab at the University of Washington, arrives at the same conclusion, mechanism, and assertions, except that, instead of using NMR, he suggests that a 270um UV absorption peak is the identifier of such water structure.
 It gets worse (or better). The electrochemistry of the different water samples offered yet another point of overlap. Pollack described charge separation and potential differences in exclusion-zone systems. Themarox-treated water also showed measurable electrochemical shifts, including changes in redox chemistry, oxygen demand, colloid stability, and microbial burden.
 But again, the “consensus” among water chemists argues for more conventional explanations for this phenomenon: hydrolysis of iron and aluminum species, double-layer compression, flocculation, and oxidation of dissolved organics. Fine. But once enough of these overlaps accumulate, I find it difficult not to ask whether two apparently different systems may be arriving at a shared class of behavior through different routes.
 The Missing Variable: Mineral Composition
 That was the point at which I began to suspect that the real missing variable in the entire structured-water conversation was minerals.
 This is a critical point: Pollack’s experiments were done in demineralized water, which makes perfect laboratory sense if one is trying to isolate surface effects. But every other earlier scientist, including Shimanishi, who was interested in biologically active water, studied water as it actually exists in life and geology: mineralized, ionic, embedded in gradients, and interacting with charged surfaces.
 Pollack’s system, by contrast, stripped all of that chemistry away. Which, in one sense, was fantastic. Pollack was able to create water with similar properties under controlled conditions, allowing him to describe its properties and behaviors in ways not possible in nature!
 Still, to my mind, that is not a trivial difference. Water in biology is never just H₂O. In geology, water is never just H₂O. Water in a cell, around a protein, inside a soil pore, along a clay sheet, or moving through a fractured mineral system is always a mineral solution. Its conductivity, buffering behavior, redox activity, interfacial dynamics, and biological compatibility all arise from that composition. Remove the minerals, and you have not created natural water; you have created an experimental medium. Useful for conducting precise investigations, yes. Biologically representative, no.
 Once that realization settled in, the structured-water question shifted for me. I found myself more interested in the ionic environments it carries, the surfaces it touches, and how those variables reorganize the medium.
 In that light, Pollack’s use of synthetic Nafion tubes became newly suggestive. Nafion is a synthetic polymer, yes, but it behaves in some respects like an intensely charged mineral surface. Its fixed negative charges mimic a crucial feature of natural mineral interfaces. Which means that Pollack’s experimental system may have been reproducing, in a stripped-down synthetic form, something that water encounters continuously in geological environments.
 That possibility pulled me back toward Shimanishi. Themarox does not merely “purify” water. It introduces a specific mineral spectrum, one rich in strongly “cosmotropic” ions derived from a weathered vermiculite lattice. Once dissolved, those ions alter the ionic field, change interfacial behavior, reshape electrochemical conditions, and create an environment in which water no longer behaves like a generic bulk fluid.
 Seen in that light, the overlap between Pollack’s findings and Shimanishi’s observations begins to look less like a coincidence and more like two different experimental paths stumbling toward the same chemical territory.
 The Structured Water Device Industry
 At that point, I also began to see more clearly why the structured-water device industry had gone off the rails. Once you remove minerals from the center of the discussion, you create a vacuum that devices are only too happy to fill. Magnets, electrodes, vortices, frequency gadgets, and every other piece of expensive plumbing theater rush in to promise order from outside the system.
 I do not deny that externally applied energy can transiently order or align water molecules. Thermodynamic principles have demonstrated that already. A whirlpool maintains its structure only while energy is moving through it. A hurricane exists only while its gradients persist. Cells, soils, and organisms are no different; they preserve order only so long as they can maintain gradients.
 Which means that if one really wants to understand durable biological order, the question is not whether one can briefly perturb or organize water with some clever device. The question is whether the ionic and mineral framework of the medium can support stable electrochemical organization over time.
 So that is where I now leave the structured-water question. Not solved. Not embraced as a slogan. Not discarded. Narrowed. I no longer need to insist that Shimanishi’s mineral system “structures” water in the way the popular term implies. What I need, and what the next step in the argument gives me, is something older, firmer, and much more precise.
 Once mineral surfaces are taken into account, dissolved ions cannot be treated as background. Natural waters are mineral solutions, and the ions they carry systematically alter hydration, protein stability, interfacial charge, and molecular organization.
 Franz Hofmeister recognized this more than a century ago. And once I finally let that sink in, the entire conversation became far more powerful, because we were no longer arguing over slogans. We were back on the solid ground of chemistry.
 Hoffmeister described a series of mineral-specific effects, showing how different minerals influence protein stability, surface tension, interfacial charge, and molecular organization throughout biological systems. Put simply, the structure and behavior of water are determined by the minerals dissolved within it .
 And that, for my purposes, is where the discussion becomes both older and more precise. Because once the conversation shifts from sweeping claims about “structured water” to the specific and measurable effects of dissolved ions on hydration shells, interfaces, proteins, and gradients, we leave the land of slogans and enter the much firmer terrain of Hofmeister chemistry.
 That realization is what led directly to my insight into Primora Bio as a deliberately constructed mineral environment, one designed by nature to shift water toward a more stable, cosmotropic state, where organization is not imposed from the outside, but emerges from the chemistry itself.
 And once you see water that way, it becomes very difficult to see it any other way again.
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 Bonus fun: Video of me teaching Lisa the various Japanese bows we need to use next week:

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 Sale: 25% off all single bottles of Aurmina or Primora Bio , with separate, already-included bundle discounts ranging from 25% to 30% on multi-bottle and combination bundles.
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 From Research to Practice - Links Below Images

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: That realization led to something more scientifically accurate and useful: "cosmotropic water," a mineral-defined framework that now underpins a new category of agricultural input.


Bringing Dead Soil Back to Life With a Breakthrough 20 Years in the Making

As my readers know, I have spent months writing two books totaling more than 150,000 words, trying to understand why Shimanishi spent 20 years working alone to extract minerals from black mica rock, and what the true significance of that achievement might be.
 The field trial I will show you below is one of the reasons I kept going.
 What you’re about to see did not begin in fertile soil. It began in what can only be described as near-dead ground in Temecula, California—dry, sandy, lifeless land that lies outside even the marginal conditions under which the region’s vineyards can survive. No legacy fertility waiting to be unlocked. Just the near absence of life.
 What is critical to understand is this: aside from water treated with Shimanishi’s extract, almost no conventional agricultural inputs were used.
 No herbicides.

 No pesticides.

 No biologics.

 No biostimulants.

 No soil amendments.

 Barely any fertilizer.

 The soil was heavily irrigated 1–2 weeks before planting. Seeds went in. Once they emerged, the plants were supported with simple weekly “foliar” applications—fine misting of the plant leaves with Themarox-treated water. Mid-season, a single fish hydrolysate was applied, according to the farmers, “to enhance taste.”
 That was the entire system. What followed is the reason I believe this work matters. You will see the beginning - bare, pale, structureless soil. And then you will see what it became:
 Vibrant color. Density. Structure. Yield. Not forced. Not inflated. Organized.
 Little pest pressure. No meaningful disease. Minimal hand weeding.
 A single control row of cucumbers was planted under identical conditions, except that both irrigation and foliar spraying used untreated water. That row tells its own story: dull color, curled leaves, fungal pressure, visible stress. It looks like what we’ve come to accept as normal.
 The rest of the field does not.
 People came from around the area to see it, because the difference was not subtle. It was immediate, physical, and difficult to explain using the usual language of inputs and outputs. I have written thousands of words trying to describe the mechanism behind this.
 But at some point, the words have to give way to something else. This is that moment. This is what it looks like when the system begins to organize again.
 This field trial was conducted in Temecula, California, by the amazing regenerative farmers Patrick Raskin ( Volcanna Rain ) and Ryan Schumacher ( Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company ).

 Pre-planting irrigation: added a Themarox diluted solution equivalent to 12ml of Primora Bio per gallon of water (formulation used was Rascon’s Volcanna Rain ), and the soil was irrigated with 100 gallons per 1/8 of an acre - 400 gallons total to the soil. (*Note that the amount of water applied was a special use case; water volume for typical every 5 year soil spray with Primora Bio requires far less water. )
 Irrigation was applied 1-2 weeks before seed planting.

 Weeds are not simply a sign of low minerals; they are a response to imbalance. When soil mineral availability and biological function improve, crops tend to become more competitive, and weed pressure often declines. As those conditions are restored, the advantage shifts away from opportunistic growth and back toward organized plant systems.

 What you just witnessed departs from the long-standing practice of layering multiple inputs to “supercharge” yield and quality. Instead, it represents something more unusual, a novel agricultural intervention which operates upstream of all of that.
 It was not the result of a better fertilizer program or a more refined protocol; it was a change in the medium itself. It is what happens when a cosmotropic aqueous solution is introduced into an agricultural system.
 Cosmotropes, Chaotropes, and Hofmeister Chemistry
 What does “cosmotropic water” even mean? Here is where, I believe, a fundamental paradigm shift will occur.
 All water contains dissolved minerals, and the composition of the minerals determines the biological and chemical properties of the water.
 For over a century, water chemists have recognized that different ions influence water in fundamentally different ways: some stabilize and organize it, while others disrupt it. This distinction was borne of the work of Franz Hofmeister, a 19th-century Austrian scientist who discovered that different ions influence protein behavior and water structure in systematic ways. His work led to the Hofmeister series , a foundational framework in chemistry and biology describing how ions stabilize or disrupt molecular organization in aqueous systems.
 Hofmeister classified ions according to these effects as either cosmotropic or chaotropic.
 Primora Bio is built around a rare combination of highly cosmotropic ions and minerals that promote more stable hydration, more ordered interactions, and more controlled electrochemical behavior in water.
 In biology, this matters. Water with a more cosmotropic influence affects how proteins fold, how enzymes function, and how membranes maintain energy gradients. Ultimately, every biochemical and cellular process in nature is occurs through and is influenced by water.
 When the ionic environment supports stability, these systems operate efficiently. When it does not, they become less reliable and harder to regulate.
 This is where we move from simple theory to foundational chemistry.
 In my upcoming book, From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV), I trace the role of water and minerals across agriculture, hydrology, and biology, beginning from the earliest cellular life on Earth, to the modern era, where their role has begun to shift.
 In Chapter 38, in collaboration with my friend, colleague, and mineral expert Matt Bakos (the sole North American importer of Themarox for the past 20 years), we present a framework we call the Geohydrological Shift Theory .
 It begins with a set of signals already visible in the agricultural literature. An excerpt from FVTV:
 Large-scale analyses of global agriculture have documented a growing pattern of yield stagnation across major cropping systems, with between 24% and 39% of production areas showing little to no yield increase despite continued input intensification (Ray et al., 2012). Even in highly optimized systems, yield gains are approaching biophysical ceilings (Grassini et al., 2013). At the same time, fertilizer inputs—particularly nitrogen—have risen dramatically without proportional yield benefits, indicating declining efficiency (Zhang et al., 2015). Taken together, these findings suggest a transition from increasing returns to diminishing returns and rising input dependence.
 Our hypothesis is that the root cause is geohydrological.
 Specifically:
 Groundwater systems are undergoing widespread chemical change, driven by intensive use, land practices, and hydrological disruption. These changes are now documented globally and are closely linked to declining groundwater levels and altered recharge dynamics.
 Key mechanisms include:
 Over-pumping / drawdown
 declining water tables

 seawater intrusion

 upconing of saline groundwater

 altered mixing and residence times

 redox shifts

 Agricultural inputs and irrigation
 nitrate contamination

 rising salinity and major ions

 mineral transformations (e.g., pyrite oxidation → sulfate + iron oxides)

 Seawater intrusion and ion exchange
 Na⁺ ↔ Ca²⁺ / Mg²⁺ exchange

 altered ionic balance and trace element mobility

 Recharge alteration (MAR, wastewater)
 changes in oxygen and carbon

 redox-driven mobilization or precipitation of metals

 Desalination / RO systems
 altered delivered water chemistry

 reduced mineral content requiring blending and remineralization

 As a result, the modern disturbance to Earth’s water sources is twofold.
 First, we are degrading aquifers and source waters themselves through heavy metals from mining, nitrate seepage from industrial fertilizers, salinization, and the widespread disruption of soil–water systems.
 Second, once water is extracted, we strip it again through water treatment and purification systems optimized for sterility, pipe stability, and liability protection rather than biological legibility.
 In effect, we disturb modern water twice. For more than a century, first slowly and now more rapidly, we have altered it underground, and then systematically deconditioned it again aboveground. This is why the theory is best named geohydrological rather than merely biochemical, as the impacts on the former precede the latter.
 At its simplest, our collective insight is that the world’s water is increasingly chaotropic, and that this shift is impacting biology across kingdoms—first in agriculture, then in microbes, animals, and humans.
 Why is this relevant to the field trial? It represents one piece of evidence supporting this theory. If chaotropic water is contributing to stagnating yields, declining gains, and, in some regions, agronomists are beginning to report literal decreases in yield despite increasing inputs and interventions, then the solution may lie in returning water toward a more cosmotropic balance.
 We believe that Themarox can return water toward such a Pre-Anthropogenic state, described in antiquity as “Living water” or “Vital water.” Before the Industrial Revolution, living systems were bathed in waters that had undergone prolonged geological conditioning through slow contact with mineral surfaces, ion exchange, and redox-buffered environments, emerging not as chemically blank or disordered fluid but as geochemically conditioned water, i.e. Nature’s water.
 In hydrogeologic terms, groundwater chemistry was shaped by recharge composition, residence time, water–rock interaction, and biogeochemical redox cycling. That is standard science. The implications, however, have not been followed far enough.
 Put plainly, we believe that “living water” was, in more modern water chemistry terms, cosmotropic water. And if the root cause lies upstream, where chemistry and biology are being degraded, then the solution must be directed there as well.
 It is fair to exercise skepticism if you think this theory rests solely on a row of cucumbers treated with chaotropic groundwater compared to produce treated with cosmotropic water.
 However, that view ignores the broader signal. Note that the trial began in dead soil, and, relying on cosmotropic water as the sole agricultural input, it produced a system with minimal pest, weed, and disease pressure, reducing the need for pesticides and herbicides and requiring almost no fertilizer.
 Skeptical or not, I am used to colleagues accusing me of “too-rapid adoption” when making recommendations for or treating patients with therapies based on what they viewed as “insufficient evidence.” That has followed me throughout my career, well before the “War on Ivermectin.”
 To date, I know of not one of those “early calls” that were later proven incorrect when the totality of the data that followed is viewed objectively. However, it is always possible that this will be the first; every streak ends eventually. If so, I will have to accept that I may have prematurely gone “all in” on investing in the Asao Group's mission to bring Shimanishi’s discovery to the world.
 But even there, we are seeing signals. To wit, we sold our first bottle of Aurmina on October 1, 2025.
 Two months later, our repeat-customer rate was 11%, unsurprising for a product designed to last for months. But then, over the last 90 days, much to our astonishment, that number has reached 66%.
 In most early-stage consumer products, strong repeat rates average about 30% and rarely exceed 50%.
 There is something happening. And whatever it is, it does not behave like a typical product signal, it behaves like a system response.
 So maybe it is not too premature to suggest Themarox as a possible response to what appears to be a worsening trajectory in the degradation of water systems. The reason I say that is because this field trial is the first time I have seen a reversal of that magnitude that does not rely on force. And that kind of reversal matters more than any individual result. But the individual results are already there, as can be seen in my recent summary of the growing evidence base for Themarox’s impacts on the largest and most diverse number of agricultural outcomes associated with a single input in history.
 Because if the above can be seen in soil that had effectively nothing to give, then the implications are not local. They are systemic. They point to something we have misunderstood and may still be able to correct.
 That is why I have spent these many months writing and researching. That is why I kept going, because once you see this, it becomes very difficult to ignore the possibility that we are not dealing with a problem of inputs, but a problem of conditions.
 Essentially, we do not think about water correctly. We treat it as a background input. A neutral medium. Something required, but not something that shapes what happens within it.
 And yet every biochemical interaction, every cellular process, every system in soil and biology occurs in water. Not in abstraction. In water with specific properties, specific mineral composition, and specific electrochemical behavior. I sense that this has been largely overlooked.
 We have focused on nutrients, organisms, and interventions, while neglecting the medium that determines how they interact. If that’s true, then it changes where we look. And it changes where we intervene.
 That means the solution has been hiding in plain sight.
 For those of you who have been following this work and for those seeing it for the first time, today we’re launching a new category of agricultural inputs, a cosmotropic mineral concentrate derived from Themarox , called Primora Bio , while kicking off our Spring World Water Day sale .
 But for now, sit with what you’ve seen here.
 Because this is where the story stops being theoretical—and starts becoming something you can actually use.
 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now

 World Water Day Sale - Discount Code: Springsale26
 Sale: 25% off all single bottles of Aurmina or Primora Bio , with separate, already-included bundle discounts ranging from 25% to 30% on multi-bottle and combination bundles.
 UK, European Customers : Our first UK distributor, Nicholas Smith at The Water Dr. , is offering a 10% discount until the end of the month, with coupon code KORYUK10 . Much larger savings will be made by reducing shipping costs, given his 1-bottle fixed-price delivery of £5 for the UK and £15 for the EU (standard tracked and insured).
 Regenerative Farming Starter Kit : For readers looking forward to kickstarting their best summer garden ever, spring planting is around the corner, and I am most excited about our “ Regenerative Farming Starter Kit ,” which includes Primora Bio (cosmotropic water concentrate), Primora Char (high-grade liquid biochar), and Primora Nourish (liquid fish hydrolysate fertilizer).
 *I have not written about the wonders of biochar or fish hydrolysate, but will soon.
 From Research to Practice - Links Below Images

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: A photographic record of how a 1/2 acre of "dead" soil responded to Shimanishi’s mineral extract, and why the implications may extend far beyond agriculture (plus the Aurmina/Primora Bio Spring Sale).


The Efficacy Of Primora Bio In Agriculture: Quantitative Synthesis Of Existing Studies

Disclaimer:
 The studies summarized below were performed using mineral solution products derived from the same parent Themarox complex and prepared at the same mineral composition and dilution as Primora Bio .
 Novel Functional Category
 Across multiple independent studies, Themarox demonstrates coordinated improvements in plant yield, photosynthetic activity, antioxidant capacity, disease resistance, and reduced uptake of pesticide residues under comparable exposure conditions.
 No conventional agricultural input class—fertilizers, biostimulants, microbial inoculants, or soil amendments—has been shown to simultaneously influence growth efficiency, metabolic resilience, and contaminant handling to this extent.
 The evidence suggests that Themarox functions as a redox-active, catalytic, ion-exchange-enhancing agent that influences plant metabolism, mineral handling, stress resilience, contaminant burden, and ecological function simultaneously.
 Scope of Evidence
 The evidence base behind this chapter draws from six independent controlled studies, an out-of-print Japanese primary source book, and a series of government and institutional agricultural evaluations conducted across Japan and Mexico. Taken together, they document more than forty distinct reported outcomes clustered across twelve independent domains of plant biology. The most rigorous of those — controlled measurements of photosynthesis, nematode survival, and antioxidant chemistry — are developed in the chapters that follow. The chapters after it go beneath that surface — into the plant cell, and out into the water around the crop.
 All original studies and reports, except for the copyrighted book Rock-Water, can be accessed and downloaded from an OSF repository here .
 Reported Agricultural, Soil, Water, Aquaculture, Animal, and Physiological Outcomes Associated with Rock Water
 1. Increases in Yield and Photosynthesis
 Rice was the most repeatedly tested crop, and the most telling — intensively managed, with stable expected yields, so deviations stand out. In a 1993 Wakayama field program, during one of the worst cold-weather rice seasons in modern Japanese history, Mineral-22-treated paddies reportedly out-yielded untreated fields by 20–25 percent, with more tillering and better lodging resistance (RW-5). The most carefully measured trial — a treatment-versus-control study on reclaimed Korean coastal farmland under the UN Development Programme with Seoul National University — found harvested ears and clean grain each up about 17 percent, while immature grain fell by roughly 31 percent (AG-13). That last number matters most: a third less wasted reproductive effort means the plant was finishing what it started. A separate foliar trial linked to the National University of Mexico saw tillers, panicles, filled grains, and yield all rise 17–37 percent, plus an 18 percent gain in germination from pre-soaking seed (AG-20).
 A Japanese report framed the mechanism: Themarox as a water-soluble complex-ion preparation raising photosynthetic capacity 20–40 percent and driving nitrate reduction into amino acids — plant growth as a redox process needing catalytic trace elements (AG-12). Reported yields tracked the same way across rice, strawberry, tea, and tomato, all up 20–38 percent (RW-6, RW-7, RW-24), with potatoes +26 percent and 17 percent more starch (RW-8), onions +15 percent (RW-9), and burdock over 20 percent (RW-10, RW-11). These are observational field reports, not randomized trials — best read as a consistent pattern. Across crops the gain was less about size than about maturation and quality: better-finished, better-keeping, higher-grade produce.

 2. Plant Mineral Content, Maturation, and Taste
 In a 100-acre San Joaquin Valley citrus grove that had gone non-productive from mineral lockout, an eleven-week foliar program of Volcanna Rain on Navel oranges moved seven of twelve measured leaf nutrients into their optimal ranges — iron and calcium roughly doubling by mid-season (AG-14, AG-15). The striking part was retention: leaf nutrients normally fall as the season closes, yet late-season levels held above optimal across the board. It was a single-arm observational record, not a controlled trial, but it showed what the yield reports imply from outside — tissue chemistry moving toward balance and holding it, several systems stabilizing at once rather than one being pushed by a single added salt.
 Quality moved the same way. Sugar rose repeatedly: treated grapes reportedly hit 17.2–19.9° Brix against 15.6–16.5 for untreated (RW-27), with strawberries around 15° Brix and better color, shape, and premium-grade ratios (RW-12). Treated produce also kept longer — delayed yellowing in cucumbers and slower deterioration across categories (RW-17, RW-18, RW-19) — which matters because 30–40 percent of fruit and vegetable production is lost between field and consumer, and shelf-life gains without chemical preservation are largely absent from the conventional toolkit.
 The plants were also built differently: thicker stems, better lodging resistance, deeper leaf color, more fine-root development, straighter root crops, lower fruit deformation (RW-13, RW-19). That distinction is the through-line — conventional fertilization adds mass, but stem architecture, fruit shape, and premium grade require something else. Across treated systems the gain was maturation, structure, and quality rather than size, pointing toward mineral balance and redox-coordinated development.
 3. Increases in THC, Terpenes, and Reduction in Pesticide Uptake
 A more recent greenhouse study tested whether Drops of Balance (equivalent to Mineral-22) could reduce contamination and affect cannabinoid and terpene production in cannabis over a 13.5-week cycle, across three groups: untreated control, soil pretreated once before planting, and plants treated during the grow (AG-16, AG-17, AG-18). Samples went to a third-party lab, tested in triplicate.
 Three findings stood out. Myclobutanil — the one pesticide persistent enough to track — accumulated about 50 percent less in plant tissue after treatment, with some reductions of 70–85 percent (AG-16). The soil-pretreatment group showed up to 50 percent more THC and 50–75 percent more total terpenes than controls, plus three to four terpenes absent from the other groups — gains that appeared only with pretreated soil, not mid-cycle treatment (AG-17). And two weeks before harvest, mold struck roughly two-thirds of control plants versus about 10 percent of treated ones — though the authors noted mold was not a controlled variable, so it’s a signal, not a result (AG-18). The heavy-metal data showed no consistent trend (AG-16).
 The study isn’t blinded, randomized, or definitive, but under real cultivation it associated Rock-Water with lower pesticide accumulation, higher cannabinoid and terpene output, and less mold — evidence it can alter contaminant handling and metabolic expression in vivo.

 5. Increase in Photosynthetic Activity
 Behind the manufacturer’s 20–40 percent photosynthesis claim — a trade figure — sat a controlled laboratory dose-response study that asked whether the effect was real and where it peaked. Wheat, rice, cowpea, and broad bean seeds were soaked in Mineral-22 from 100 to 1,500 ppm, then measured for seedling height, biomass, and photosynthetic electron-transport activity (AG-11). The results were non-linear: low and intermediate doses improved growth and photosynthetic function, while excessive concentrations reduced the benefit or inhibited outright. Height rose 10–20 percent and biomass 10–30 percent across species, and rice at 500 ppm showed roughly a 40 percent jump in photosynthetic activity — while broad beans actually declined at high doses.
 That dose-window shape is the key. A fertilizer model predicts more mineral, more growth; here there was an optimal dose that too much overshot — the behavior of a catalyst or regulator, which is how the authors read it. And photosynthesis is the natural place to see it: it’s an electron-transfer system at bottom, so if Rock-Water alters electron-transfer efficiency, oxidative balance, or ionic behavior near biological interfaces, photosynthetic systems should be among the first to respond.

 6. In-Vitro Pest Suppression
 The same Mexico group ran a second controlled assay, this time on plant-parasitic nematodes isolated from tomato-field soil, exposed to graded doses of Themarox and Mineral-22 against an untreated control of about 1,250 organisms (AG-19). Both killed dose-dependently along a smooth curve: Themarox removed about 84 percent at 100 ppm, climbing to nearly 98 percent at 500 ppm, with the tenfold-weaker Mineral-22 tracking the same curve at correspondingly higher doses. At low concentrations the organisms showed a molting reaction; at higher ones, microscopy showed the body wall disintegrating, the animals collapsing as if dehydrated.
 The point isn’t pest control — it’s a single in-vitro assay on isolated organisms, not a field demonstration, and shouldn’t be inflated into a crop-protection claim. The point is the clean dose-response against a counted control: the signature of a real biological action, the second such signature alongside the photosynthesis study. It shows Themarox acting on living cells at low concentration in a way consistent with oxidative, membrane, or electrochemical effects at the organism-water interface — the same interfacial mechanism that keeps surfacing across this record.

 6. Antioxidant Capacity and The First Mammalian Signal
 The one study that doesn’t stay inside agriculture. Hsu and colleagues grew tartary buckwheat sprouts sprayed with either deionized water or trace-element water at 100–500 ppm, with the strongest response at 300 ppm (RW-1). Treated sprouts accumulated more copper, zinc, and iron (up ~21, 32, and 58 percent) and became measurably better antioxidant systems — stronger radical scavenging, ion chelating, reducing power, and inhibition of lipid peroxidation. Tellingly, this was independent of flavonoid content: rutin, quercitrin, and quercetin were essentially unchanged, so the gain wasn’t the plant simply making more of its usual protective compounds.
 Then the investigators did something nothing else in this record does: they exposed human HepG2 liver cells to extracts from the sprouts. Cells given extract from the trace-element group showed higher superoxide dismutase activity and lower reactive oxygen species than controls (RW-1). The scope is narrow — one cell line, one plant, one set of assays — but it’s the single point in the entire agricultural evidence base where conditioning a plant’s mineral environment produced a measurable effect in human cells. Whatever the conditioning did to the plant did not stop at the plant boundary.

 7. Ecosystem and Biodiversity
 This rests on the unspent half of the Korean study — the one genuine paired treatment-and-control entry in the agricultural record, run on reclaimed coastal rice farmland under the UN Development Programme with Seoul National University and Korean government agencies around 1999–2000 (AG-13). Beyond the grain-quality numbers (ears up ~17 percent, immature grain down ~31 percent), the investigators also monitored the surrounding ecosystem. Aquatic insect species diversity in the treated zones ran roughly 1.6 times higher than in untreated areas — while water quality held steady across pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, chemical oxygen demand, and nutrients, with no adverse effects.
 That 1.6-fold biodiversity gain is an ecological metric, not a yield one, and it points opposite to almost everything in modern agriculture. The dominant inputs of the last century buy productivity by spending ecological function — they raise the crop and lower the surrounding life, a trade so routine we’ve stopped noticing it’s a trade. An intervention tied to higher yield, higher quality, and higher biodiversity in the same plots, with no water degradation, isn’t making that trade. Whether it reproduces under stricter conditions is open — but as a signal, it’s the quiet capstone of the agricultural evidence: more food without the usual ecological bill.

 Overall Pattern
 Across plants, soils, aquatic systems, and animal studies, the reported outcomes cluster around five recurring themes:
 Improved mineral incorporation

 Improved redox and oxidative regulation

 Improved water and oxygen handling

 Improved biological organization and resilience

 Improved exchange between organisms and their environment

 Not every outcome has been demonstrated with the same level of evidence. Some come from controlled experiments, some from field trials, some from observational reports, and some from company archives. However, the remarkable feature of the literature is the consistency of direction: biological systems repeatedly appear to become more productive, more resilient, more organized, and more efficient across multiple domains simultaneously.
 Independant Studies
 Across six controlled agricultural and biological studies (crop trials, soil restoration, metabolic assays, and ecosystem monitoring), Rock—Water, made from Themarox-derived solutions identical to Primora Bio, was evaluated for its effects on plant productivity, contaminant handling, antioxidant capacity, photosynthetic activity, and ecological resilience.
 The collective dataset spans:
 Controlled crop trials (rice, citrus, cannabis, buckwheat)

 Soil and ecosystem restoration field studies

 Biochemical and cellular antioxidant investigations

 Government and institutional agricultural evaluations

 Bottom-Line Quantitative Impact Statement (Across All Studies)
 Across agronomic, biochemical, and ecosystem endpoints, Primora Bio water solutions demonstrated:
 +16–17% increases in productive plant structures

 ~30% reductions in immature or poorly matured yield components

 +21–58% increases in trace mineral incorporation into plant tissue

 ~15–30% increases in antioxidant capacity across assays

 ~15–25% increases in cellular antioxidant enzyme activity

 ~15–20% reductions in intracellular oxidative stress markers

 ~50% average reductions in pesticide residue accumulation (peaks ~70–85%)

 ~1.2× increases in ecosystem biodiversity metrics

 No measurable environmental toxicity or water-quality deterioration

 Integrated Interpretation
 Taken together, the studies do not show a narrow fertilizer-like effect. Instead, they reveal a multi-domain agricultural impact profile , including:
 Improved plant metabolic efficiency and photosynthesis

 Enhanced trace mineral incorporation and redox capacity

 Reduced contaminant uptake and oxidative stress burden

 Accelerated maturation and structural productivity

 Improved soil ecology and environmental resilience

 If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now

 *If what you just read raised questions about the mineral system at the center of it, you can explore it further at Aurmina.com or Primorabio.com , where we are working to make Shimanishi’s extraordinary achievement more widely available for both drinking water and agricultural applications respectively.

 From Research to Practice - Links Below

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: A quantitative synthesis of agricultural, biochemical, and ecosystem studies of Themarox solutions on plant productivity, soil ecology, contaminant handling, and oxidative stress.


In 1977, a Japanese Engineer Did Something Geology Takes Millions of Years to Do

I want to thank the readers who stuck with me over the last three posts , in which I presented a theory called the Rock-Water Circuit, integrating findings from fields as diverse as geology, hydrology, biology, chemistry, and origin-of-life science.
 Since it may have been too “scienc-ey” for some, know that it is over now. We will be leaving science behind as we continue the rest of the journey this book (i.e., series of posts) will take you on.
 A core insight of our proposed Rock–Water Circuit framework, which goes beyond current origin-of-life models, is that the same iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) mineral chemistry thought to have helped initiate life on early Earth also plays a central role in re-releasing the minerals that sustain biological systems today.
 That insight should actually be unsurprising in a way. Any energy system capable of sustaining life on Earth must include a mechanism that continually renews the energy gradients on which lifeforms depend. Without it, mineral systems would gradually exhaust themselves.
 When a Human Isolated a Phase of the Planetary Circuit
 For billions of years, ISAW operated only within the slow machinery of the Earth itself. Water circulated through rock; mineral lattices hydrated and exchanged ions with passing water; electrochemical gradients formed and dissipated; and the planetary energy architecture sustained the conditions under which life eventually emerged and evolved.
 Then, in the twentieth century, a human being isolated a working phase of it.
 In 1977, after two decades of solitary experimentation, a Japanese engineer succeeded in extracting and stabilizing a single operational link in the Rock–Water Circuit, separating a geologically generated chemistry from its mineral host, rendering it portable in liquid form.
 His name was Asao Shimanishi.
 What is truly remarkable about his accomplishment is that most scientific discoveries either newly map previously unknown processes in nature or, in technology, create processes that did not previously exist. Shimanishi’s work fell into a third, historically unusual category of discovery: he succeeded in isolating and stabilizing a functioning phase of a planetary process.
 This was not the work of a famous academic, a government laboratory, or a large industrial research group.
 It was done by a single individual operating outside the scientific mainstream.
 The Question That Volcanic Water Raised
 I do not believe that Shimanishi knew he was extracting a foundational piece of planetary chemistry. His goal was far more practical at the time.
 In the 1950s, given that he was trained in both mining and engineering, he had already become troubled by data showing that modern agriculture and industrial development were gradually stripping soils and water of the complex spectrum of trace minerals that had historically sustained both ecosystems and human nutrition.
 The story begins when Shimanishi was in his thirties, sitting near the water in meditation. As he gazed across the landscape, something caught his attention: a tree growing straight out of what appeared to be naked stone. There was no soil, no visible earth, only a narrow crack in a granite boulder from which the trunk rose, supporting a tree in full bloom.

 Where was it getting nourishment? Seeing a full-grown tree thriving from bare rock, Shimanishi began to suspect that the mineral composition of the rock held a unique energy or vitality that likely reminded him of volcanic regions that often produced springs whose waters were widely regarded as unusually restorative.
 Later, he discovered that the rock was an iron-rich mica, known for containing an extraordinary spectrum of trace elements, and he began to wonder whether the properties of certain waters might arise from the minerals they acquire as they pass through different rocks.
 His ambition eventually crystallized into a simple idea.
 It was an idea simple enough to describe in a sentence, yet difficult enough to occupy the next twenty years of his life.
 The vermiculite species or rock that he chose was a weathered derivative of biotite, a layered iron-bearing mica typically formed deep within Earth’s crust. Although vermiculite is more open and hydrated than biotite, its minerals remain tightly bound within stacked aluminosilicate sheets.
 Simply mixing the rock mineral with water would not release the desired spectrum of ions. Strong acids could dissolve the structure entirely, but doing so would produce unstable and potentially toxic mixtures. Gentle leaching methods were safer but painfully slow, often producing only weak solutions after years of extraction.
 For twenty years, he was driven by a single conviction: that restoring the mineral complexity modern life was quietly losing might be of benefit to humanity.
 He worked directly with rock, heat, water, sulfur, and time, advancing only through repetition, failure, adjustment, and patience measured in years. Shimanishi had one stone, one question, and the discipline to remain with it until the problem finally yielded.
 The ambition itself was elemental: to extract minerals in a form that could move beyond a single volcano or spring and enter ordinary water, soil, and life.
 A Historically Unparalleled Achievement
 It is my opinion that his achievement is unique in the history of Science. Although many scientific discoveries begin with moments of insight that then take years to develop into practical form, Shimanishi’s path was different. He spent more than 2 decades working on a single technical problem until it finally yielded a solution.
 Further, other giants in the history of science had teams, theories, funding, or infrastructure. For instance, Pasteur refined revolutionary ideas within an ecosystem that steadily supplied recognition and resources. And although Mendel also worked alone for years, and similarly succeeded in mapping out a single problem, genetics, it took him approximately a decade less. Tesla spent much of his life pursuing the idea of resonance as a transformative principle in energy and communication, but he never fully realized the system he envisioned.
 Thus, as far as I can tell, those who had come before him had either a combination of collaborators and institutional support or met with success more quickly. Shimanishi had one rock, one question, and for twenty years, he worked alone, altering temperatures, acid strengths, reaction times, sulfur sources, heating and cooling cycles, and filtration methods. Each change solved one problem but created several new ones. Too harsh a treatment destabilized the chemistry. Too gentle a process released almost nothing.
 Sulfur chemistry eventually became central to the process. In retrospect, aspects of this process resemble what modern geochemists now study as enhanced weathering , the accelerated chemical breakdown of minerals in water to release ions and alter surrounding geochemistry.
 But after nearly twenty years of iteration, failure, and refinement, he discovered that, under carefully controlled conditions, sulfur-based reactions could convert certain minerals into water-soluble sulfate forms while simultaneously helping undesirable metals precipitate or be filtered out.
 In 1977, he produced a liquid solution containing a spectrum of minerals, dominated by iron and sulfur, with dozens of other elements appearing in minute (yet still active) amounts. He named this extract Themarox , or “Rock Extract.”
 What followed was unexpected. When the extract was added to water, it seemed to awaken processes already present in nature. Murky water clarified. Suspended debris gathered into visible clusters and settled to the bottom. In ponds and fish tanks, foul, stagnant water became clear and oxygen-rich.
 When applied to soils and irrigation water, crops grew with unusual vigor, grasses thickened, vegetables strengthened, and fish in aquaculture ponds became more active and resilient. Again and again, the extract appeared to stimulate the same self-organizing processes that nature uses to clean water, restore soil, and support living systems.
 The Rock Extract: Water Purification
 The mineral complex Shimanishi released from vermiculite contained an unusually broad spectrum of trace elements derived from the original mica lattice. Crucially, the elements appeared primarily as sulfate salts, reflecting the sulfur chemistry central to his extraction process.
 In practical terms, this meant the minerals were already water-soluble and charged.
 The result was a liquid mineral extract that behaved much like naturally mineralized waters, carrying a dense spectrum of ions capable of conditioning the surrounding water’s electrochemical environment.
 One of the first properties Shimanishi noticed was its ability to clarify water. When added to ponds, tanks, or reservoirs, impurities and contaminants gathered into visible aggregates that settled to the bottom.
 What is fascinating is that this phenomenon mirrors what happens continuously in nature. In rivers, wetlands, and mineral springs, water is clarified by contact with rock surfaces, which release minerals into the water, causing dispersed particles and contaminants to coagulate and settle.
 What Shimanishi had unknowingly done was extract a working fragment of nature, a phase of Earth’s mineral–water chemistry normally confined to rocks and sediments, and which could now operate inside glasses and containers.
 He obtained a patent for its use in purifying and clarifying brackish water. Eight years later, in 1985, his innovative achievement led to the founding of Shimanishi Co., where he began producing Themarox®, a citrus-colored liquid containing a “perfect symphony” of minerals (my words), electrically charged, fully dissolvable, and readily absorbed. What’s impressive is that this mineral complex belonged to nature alone; no man-made process could have synthesized a composition of minerals like these.
 As an illustration of the clarifying and purifying properties of Themarox, there is a famous 3.5-minute video clip from a Japanese news broadcast of a “clean-up” event where his minerals were used to clarify a brackish, polluted pond at a famous Shinto shrine in Tokyo. The pond was especially popular with Japanese students who visited to pray for success in entrance exams and studies. The pond went from brackish to clear in 4 hours.

 At the 2:00 mark, you’ll catch the only public sighting of Shimanishi that I am aware of, smiling as he drinks the freshly treated pond water from a glass mug that they had lowered into the pond on a rope.
 Others performed similar demonstrations in smaller tanks and bowls. At 2:41 in the same television segment above, on the host’s desk, two cloudy, contaminated fishbowls are shown, each containing a single fish barely visible through the haze. The host then treats one bowl with Themarox, and viewers can be heard reacting in surprise as the suspended particles clump together and sink, leaving the fish clearly visible and swimming in crystal-clear water.
 The Rock Extract: Agricultural Applications
 Next, he directed his efforts beyond water treatment and into agricultural and aquacultural applications, moving Themarox into agricultural trials, seed germination tests, and soil restoration initiatives in Japan and other countries.
 It did not take long for farmers to notice certain patterns in soil and crops.
 The rice didn’t just grow. The stalks were sturdier, more resistant to pests and insects, and the plants stayed upright instead of collapsing in wind and rain. Vegetable plots developed plants that grew with a vigor older farmers recognized from their youth. Golf courses began buying Themarox to ensure fuller, verdant, and more resilient grasses.
 In fish farms and ponds, operators added his extract and watched as foul-smelling, low-oxygen water cleared. Fish that had been sluggish and prone to disease became more active and fed more vigorously. The mortality in eel farms dropped, and the eels reportedly scored the highest quality meat grades in the sushi market. A few environmental engineers began using the solution in polluted lakes and lagoons, reporting improvements in water clarity, odor, algal blooms, and biota.
 Problem: Shimanishi did not work within academia; thus, his objectives were not centered on research and publication. He preferred relying on demonstrations to customers to help grow his business.
 Despite not being a pure academic (although a brilliant scientist), there does exist a small collection of published studies and technical reports on the efficacy of Themaraox in agriculture, including a U.N. internal report of a soil restoration project, a Japanese Ministry of Health field trial, a peer-reviewed seed germination study, and company video archives.
 However, based on a comprehensive analysis of the existing evidence base, which includes two recent studies conducted by U.S distributors of Themarox-derived solutions, the number and diversity of the positive outcomes suggest that Themarox represents a “novel functional category” in terms of its potential impacts on agriculture.
 The studies demonstrate coordinated improvements in;
 plant yield

 photosynthetic activity,

 antioxidant capacity

 disease resistance

 nutrient uptake

 reductions in immature yield components

 increased soil microbial diversity

 improved balance among dominant bacterial species

 enhanced soil habitat quality

 significantly reduced uptake of pesticide residues (an observation particularly relevant in light of growing concerns about glyphosate exposure).

 A summary of the above studies, including the reports themselves, has been compiled in a separate post here , detailing the precise magnitudes of the observed improvements for each outcome listed above.
 What I am trying to communicate to the public (and the world) is that, to this point in history, no single conventional agricultural input, either fertilizers, biostimulants, microbial inoculants, or soil amendments, has been shown to influence all these metrics simultaneously.
 More difficult to write off, although not formally documented, are the thousands of use cases reported to the company and its representatives.
 The Rock Extract: Therapeutic Applications
 Readers sometimes wonder how yours truly, a physician, ended up spending what is now seven months glued to a computer for eighteen hours a day, wandering far outside medicine into mineralogy, water chemistry, geology, soil biology, agriculture, and origin-of-life science (which has done noticeable damage to his own health in the process).
 The explanation is straightforward: for the first time in my career, I had stumbled onto something that appeared to influence physiology not just in patients, but across entire living systems — microbes, plants, animals, humans, and even the water systems that sustain them.
 There is no precedent for that in medicine, really. No vitamin, antibiotic, immune modulator, cytotoxin, or metabolic therapy operates across biological kingdoms, let alone extends its influence into soil and water.
 No physician expects a therapeutic principle to operate in bifidobacteria, basil, eels, potatoes, and people alike. The only medicine I could find that could be tolerated outside mammals was aspirin, as salicylic acid participates in signaling in plants, but even that analogy collapsed quickly. No one has ever treated a plant with aspirin (I don’t think).
 But, for me, my journey into the world of minerals and water started when I encountered the work of a physician named Hisotake Nojima.
 Dr. Hisotake Nojima and his “Super Mineral Solution”
 Nojima was not an outsider to medicine. He rose within Japan’s public health system and served as Director of the Sawara Health Center in Chiba Prefecture before later becoming head of a regional hospital. Yet during his years in practice, he became increasingly troubled by what he saw as a blind spot in modern medical thinking. Research, he wrote, had become almost entirely focused on organic molecules while largely ignoring the role of inorganic elements, metals, salts, and mineral ions in biological function.
 His interest deepened after he encountered a solution made from Themarox. One of the first cases he described was of a town mayor with advanced gastric cancer. Surgery was being planned. The mayor’s family had heard that Nojima was quietly experimenting with a new ionized mineral solution. They were desperate.
 Nojima was still in an exploratory phase. He adjusted concentration, designed a high-dose oral regimen, and proceeded cautiously. Based on many later cases, he noted retrospectively that gastric cancers, because they are directly bathed in the mineral solution twice daily, often respond unusually fast.
 Within days, the mayor’s appetite returned. His pain diminished. He began to regain strength.
 Before gastric cancer surgery, surgeons repeat an endoscopy. The first had documented a clear malignant mass. When they returned to confirm the target, the mass was gone. The hospital physicians were, by his account, confused and effectively speechless.
 What struck Nojima was the disappearance of a documented tumor between two scopes, with no conventional therapy in between. He did not treat this as proof of a cure, but as the first signal that something fundamental was occurring that existing frameworks could not explain.
 Whatever the tumor biology was doing, equally notable was the upstream shifts he described, appetite, strength, sleep, tolerance, repair.
 Nojima then began offering the therapy to patients with advanced cancer who had exhausted surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. He repeatedly described observing pain subside and strength return. Imaging showed reduced tumor burden or halted progression. Infections improved unexpectedly. Chemotherapy became more tolerable.
 These were not isolated anecdotes in his book. They recurred in a pattern. Over time, Nojima came to understand what he was seeing as follows:
 “The minerals were restoring the body’s mineral architecture, and the body was doing the healing.”
 What Nojima Actually Claimed
 Because stories like the mayor’s invite distortion, restraint matters. Nojima never claimed universal cures. He documented recoveries, partial responses, stabilization, and non-responders. His insistence was that mineral architecture mattered to all of them. Some improved. Some stabilized. A few experienced remission.
 He also acknowledged patients so depleted that mineral restoration could not reverse the decline.
 Author’s Note: The reports above come from Nojima’s own clinical writings and have not been independently verified through modern controlled clinical trials.
 Nojima did not describe these observations as universal cures, nor did he claim that the mineral solution worked in every patient. What struck him instead was a recurring pattern: when the body's mineral (or aqueous) environment was restored, physiological resilience often seemed to improve. In his writings, he summarized this idea with a phrase that appeared repeatedly throughout his books: the solution was helping restore what he called the body’s “mineral architecture.”
 Over the following years, he documented his experiences in several books (one of which was translated into English here) and founded a nonprofit organization devoted to exploring the roles of minerals, nutrition, and environmental factors in chronic disease. At its height, he wrote, the organization had tens of thousands of members.
 Although his work remained largely unknown outside Japan and was never integrated into mainstream medical research, his clinical observations represent one of the earliest attempts by a modern physician to investigate the biological effects of a sulfated biotite-derived broad-spectrum mineral complex.
 Shimanishi also believed that the mineral spectrum in his solution could support human biological processes. In his view, since minerals act as cofactors that activate enzymes throughout the body and enzymes require specific minerals to function properly, restoring mineral diversity to water could help restore normal biological activity.
 He claimed that health improvements reported by users arose from this mineral–enzyme interaction, though he acknowledged that medical claims were legally restricted and should be approached cautiously.
 **I recount the observations above as historical medical reporting rather than as evidence of established therapeutic effects.
 What I Eventually Realized Shimanishi Had Done
 Seen this way, Shimanishi’s achievement becomes less mysterious and, in some respects, even more remarkable. He did not create a new form of water. What he succeeded in isolating was a mineral chemistry capable of conditioning water into an electrochemically organized state , much like the mineralized waters that have naturally emerged throughout history from geothermal systems dispersed among the Earth’s crust.
 Ultimately, in the framework of ISAW and the Rock-Water Circuit, what Shimanishi did, unknowingly, was extract from rock and carry into water a redox-active chemistry set that geology had long ago already assembled.
 An Older Pattern Comes Into View
 In Shimanishi’s own region of Japan alone, the accessible vermiculite reserves are sufficient for centuries, perhaps millennia, of human-scale application.
 This is not a scarce remedy.
 It is a geological inheritance.
 As detailed in From Volcanoes To Vitality , if understood and applied responsibly, Themarox may represent a path for the gradual restoration of soils, waters, husbandry, and even human health.
 Beyond that aspiration, a separate, rather unique question arose in the wake of my studies into Themarox. If a specific mineral–water chemistry capable of organizing electrochemical energy has been operating quietly within rock for billions of years, and if a human being has now managed to isolate a working phase of that chemistry, then why do ancient traditions, alchemical writings, and even fragments of early scripture appear to describe processes that map so precisely onto this same mineral–water transformation?
 The chapters that follow explore how this pattern connects modern science with far older attempts to understand the relationship between matter, water, and the organizing forces of life.
 Author’s Note on Stewardship
 Encountering Shimanishi’s work did more than reshape my understanding of minerals and water. It imposed a responsibility.
 If what he had isolated truly represented a recoverable phase of the Rock–Water Circuit, with potential impacts in restoring water, soils, agriculture, and even human health, then leaving it confined to obscurity would have been, in my view, a failure of stewardship rather than restraint.
 For that reason, midway through writing this book, I, along with my wife Lisa and my long-time practice partner at the Leading Edge Clinic , Scott Marsland, took the practical step of founding The Asao Group , a company that has made this extract accessible for careful, ethical use in drinking water ( Aurmina ) and for agricultural applications ( Primorabio ).
 Some readers will undoubtedly question this decision, but know that I did not embark on this effort solely for commercial reasons; instead, my motivation was threefold: to make a profit, fund research, and disseminate philanthropically. In fact, those principles are explicitly stated in the Asao Group’s operating agreement as the guideposts for all future corporate decisions.
 I insisted on this to preserve and carry forward Shimanishi’s ethos: to help humanity.
 In this way, the formation of the Asao Group is an attempt to ensure that a potentially consequential material, if validated through continued observation and study, would not remain locked behind geography, language, or historical accident.
 The scientific argument of this book stands independently of that effort; the company arose in response to it, not as its justification.
 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
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 *If what you just read raised questions about the mineral system at the center of it, you can explore it further at Aurmina.com or Primorabio.com , where we are working to make Shimanishi’s extraordinary achievement more widely available for both drinking water and agricultural applications, respectively.
 WORLD WATER DAY SALE
 Dear Readers, please note that next Sunday is World Water Day , which we will be celebrating with a Spring Sale discount of 25% off both Aurmina and Primora Bio , starting Thursday, March 19th, through Sunday, March 22nd.

 From Research to Practice - Links Below

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: After two decades of solitary experimentation, a Japanese engineer isolated a functioning phase of Earth’s mineral-energy system and brought it into the human world. History barely noticed.