I Thought I Was Done Changing Careers. I Was Wrong.

**This post is a day late! I wanted it as a post to celebrate World Water Day, but my 10-hour trip from Honolulu to Tokyo had no WiFi (I had planned to finish and send it on the plane). So, we are extending the sale one more day. Enjoy the 25% discount code Springsale26 at Aurmina or Primora Bio . Also, this post begins with lots of personal reflection; if you just want to get to the Spring Garden Vitalization Protocol, scroll down.

 The Same Work, A Different Scale
 As an ICU and lung doctor in the U.S, I was called an “intensivist,” while in France, my French compatriots were called “reanimators.”
 The first time they told me that, it connected, like an “ah-hah” moment, as it so perfectly described the essence of our work, given that critically ill patients are often unconscious and immobile, appearing almost lifeless to the uninitiated, either from a primary brain insult, brain failure secondary to overwhelming illness (encephalopathy), or a need for deep sedation to synchronize them with the ventilator while we try to reverse their often multi-organ failure.
 When successful, we restore the coordination of their organ systems such that their brain functions return, allowing them to either wake up or be woken up, thus “re-animating” them.
 With that in mind, here perhaps I may be extending that metaphor too far, but I feel like, even though I long ago left critical care, now that I have been drawn to work guided by that same spirit and aim, but on a far grander scale, of “re-animating” the Earth’s soils, crops, aquifers, and surface waters.
 So funny. How did a New Yorker go from running inner-city ICUs to going on a mission to resuscitate soils, plants, and waters?
 There is both a simple and complicated explanation for that. Among the many rabbit holes I have gone down in my journey researching therapies that might repair the Covid vaccine-injured, for the first time in my career, I landed on one that applied to patients as much as it did plants, grasses, microbes, and animals, one central to every biological process that supports life.
 My initial intrigue stemmed from a fascination with the responses I observed in some patients, albeit using off-label protocols distinct from water purification. The research and investigation into its obscured and fragmented history in Japan and then in the U.S. showed me the potential for benefits far beyond my clinic, my practice, and my patients.
 I sensed it before I understood it, and that sense only intensified as I traced it across geology, hydrology, biochemistry, soil biology, and agriculture—until, to my surprise, its effects in other living systems proved more compelling than anything I was seeing in human physiology.
 Something Started to Shift
 Although I studied mathematics in college, I have wanted to be a doctor since I was a teenager. Problem: I kinda, sorta, failed out of college. It then took me 7 years and an impeccable performance in grad school before I was accepted into medical school (overseas), allowing me to finally leave the restaurant business where I had spent my 20s.
 However, I soon discovered that, unlike the increasingly joyless and elusive higher-order problem-solving in mathematics, I loved my new role in life as a “diagnostician,” facing the daily task of figuring out why someone was sick and suffering. Getting that puzzle right meant everything, and in the ICU, what the residents called “medicine on steroids,” getting it wrong raised the stakes as high as they come, with up to 20% of my patients dying in some weeks. When successful, we relieved suffering and restored function, a satisfaction far more fulfilling than arriving at a successful solution to a complicated equation or devising an elegant logical proof.
 The Point of No Return
 Over these months, it became clear that my life was moving in a new direction. The work took on the shape of a mission: to uncover and disseminate Shimanishi’s insights, examine the potential of Themarox, and address a critical gap affecting soils, agriculture, water, and ultimately animal and human health.
 But, at the same time, I think this year broke me. What I stumbled upon held an importance I could not ignore or reduce to a side project or hobby, as these books and this research took over my life to a magnitude that makes my previously frenetic, all-consuming advocacy for ivermectin in Covid pale in comparison.
 I have been so inspired by Shimanishi’s work and the realization that I had stumbled upon something so impactful, with such potential, and that had somehow slipped under History’s gaze, only retained in small pockets of people around the world.
 But what happened was that the joy and fulfillment I had always gotten from seeing patients began to feel like a detractor from what I was supposed to be doing. I began to wake up with frustration and exhaustion, knowing that each day was taking me away from what I increasingly felt was more important work.
 I really don’t give a crap if you think I am talking crazy or in a self-interested manner. I did not make that decision lightly or for commercial reasons. What I am trying to say is that it was effectively made for me in spirit. I resisted for a while, but I followed where it was leading and even started a company to get it done, especially so that the company would devote itself to funding the research it would require to get there, meaning to convince the world of this vision that I, and an increasing number of others, hold.
 The Decision
 So, after 25 years, I have decided to stop seeing patients. Although I will continue to lead, manage, and guide our Leading Edge Clinic , as of June, I am giving up my personal patient practice panel. One reason I was comfortable stopping is that the provider team at LEC is phenomenal, inspiring, devoted, and empathetic, perhaps in ways that now exceed my capacity. So I am confident that in handing over my patients to them, they will continue to be cared for with the skill and care they need.
 Now, if that was not enough of a personal reveal on this belated World Water Day, there is yet another reason I closed my patient schedule.
 My wife is pregnant with a baby boy due on July 4th.
 I have been reminded that apparently, you are supposed to spend time with young children, and since I don’t have time to pee most days, I thought it wise to create some space to welcome young Lutzee onto planet Earth.
 Do not make fun of the name; it is a phonetic spelling of my Hungarian father’s nickname “Laci,” a common diminutive of his real name, “Lazlo.”
 If I put “Laci” on the birth certificate, the poor child would forever be called “Lacey,” and I don’t want to set him on the path depicted in the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue.”

 My Contribution To World Water Day
 With the history of my career trajectory behind us, I now want to focus on the real purpose of today’s post, which is two-fold.
 The first is to offer as concise an articulation of the “Geohydrological Shift Theory” as I can muster, aimed at the world’s agronomists, hydrogeologists, soil biologists, regenerative farmers, and others working in these domains, with the intent of shifting their focus to what we believe is a viable solution to many of the problems befalling modern agriculture.
 The second is for a more specific segment of my readership, those who “identify” (hee hee) as home gardeners, hobby farmers, and even farmers, where I will lay out this former intensivist’s “combination therapy resuscitative and re-vitalization protocol,” to kick off your spring planting season toward a harvest most have never experienced before.
 So, if you’re interested only in the latter, feel free to skip toward the end. If you’re interested in both, read on.
 When The Geohydrological Shift Began
 If you want to understand what is happening to our water, you have to go back to the moment agriculture fundamentally changed.
 The “Green Revolution” began in the 1940s in Mexico, led by agronomist Norman Borlaug, who developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. The success of that work expanded into Asia in the 1960s, especially in India and Pakistan, and later into rice systems through institutions such as the International Rice Research Institute.
 Basically, the idea was to maximize yield per acre using external inputs and improved genetics. The core components were: high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs), synthetic fertilizers (especially nitrogen), irrigation expansion, pesticides, herbicides, and, importantly, mechanization.
 The impact was enormous, arguably one of the most successful large-scale interventions in human history. Earth saw massive increases in yields, the avoidance of widespread famine (e.g., India no longer needed food aid), lower food prices, and greater caloric availability.
 At the same time, historically, it marked a shift from antiquity, in which traditional “slow” farming practices rapidly switched to a science- and input-driven system.
 Yes, it bought the world time, and a lot of it. But I believe time is running out.
 The Shift
 Over the past few decades, the costs of this system have become increasingly apparent, like now, in my middle age, here in the 2020s. The soil is being degraded (less organic matter, microbial diversity, increasing dependence on inputs), the water system is being stressed (over-extraction of aquifers, salinization in irrigated lands), and we now suffer from a widespread chemical dependency (fertilizer and pesticide use has skyrocketed, pest resistance has emerged).
 Even worse, the benefits, although considerable, have been uneven, favoring large farms and capital-intensive systems over traditional farming.
 Where We Are Now
 My interest and passion began to sharpen as my research into water and minerals led me to what I can only describe as flashing warning signs. After nearly a hundred years of “success,” the data is now showing yield stagnation. Between 24% and 39% of global cropland is exhibiting yield plateaus; elsewhere, yield increases are being maintained, but at a slowing rate. Most concerning, and what I consider the loudest warning signal, is that in some regions yields are now declining despite increased inputs.
 Further, biological simplification abounds with the dominance of monocrops, leading to a loss of resilience and even buffering capacity.
 Basically, the more fertilizer used, the smaller the yield gains, meaning that “nitrogen efficiency” is dropping in many systems. Earth’s agriculture has now shifted from an immensely productive system to a “compensatory” one, and, in some areas, it is failing to even do that.
 Is there any hope on the horizon? Yes, but, as you will learn, not in the areas where most are placing it: regenerative agriculture, precision agriculture, and alternative inputs aimed at improving soil biology or reducing existing inputs. These are important advances, but they do not go far enough upstream.
 Now, I know this is starting to sound like doom and gloom, and the story does get worse, but this is also where I see a possible, scalable solution beginning to emerge. Because if we can fix the water, I believe we can restore the entire system.
 You see, our water systems have entered a state of overt stress. After a century of pressure, aquifer depletion is accelerating globally, while nitrate and salinity levels continue to rise, fundamentally altering hydrogeochemistry.
 The Solutions Being Proposed
 Before we get to my proposal for a path forward, I'll give a quick overview of the current directions various scientific disciplines are proposing to remediate, solve, or fix the current state of agriculture.
 The Soil Physics / Hydrology Camp
 Most mainstream scientists, such as Rattan Lal and Johan Six, as well as the broader soil physics and hydrology field, are rightly focused on the idea that soil degradation and water dysfunction are tightly linked. Their central observation is that as soil structure degrades, water infiltration declines, water retention becomes less stable, and the soil’s ability to store and deliver plant-available water is compromised.
 I am with them on this because productivity clearly declines when soil loses its ability to regulate water properly. Their proposed solution is to restore soil structure, primarily by increasing organic matter, improving aggregation, and reducing disturbance, thereby rebuilding the physical framework through which water moves and is retained.
 My take is that I disagree with where they place causality. Their emphasis is on repairing the soil as the primary lever, with water secondarily improving by restoring the condition of the soil it passes through.
 My take is that I disagree with where they place causality. Their emphasis is on repairing the soil as the primary lever, assuming that water will improve secondarily as the soil through which it moves is restored.
 The Rhizosphere / Soil Biology Camp
 Within this field are notable scientists like Elaine Ingham, Jeff Lowenfels, and other rhizosphere ecology researchers, whose focus is on the problems with microbes' root exudates and biological signaling. What I like is that they also focus on water by recognizing that all of this dysfunction occurs in water films. They clearly recognize that nutrients exist in the dissolved phase, microbial signaling depends on water quality and composition, and root uptake itself is fundamentally water-mediated.
 But here again, their solutions appear to focus not on mediating the water but on restoring microbial life and avoiding further chemical disruption by increasing organic inputs. Ultimately, restoring the biological layer that water enters will not directly address the water chemistry that is driving the disordered biology.
 The Hydrogeochemistry / Water Quality Camp
 This camp is the one that is most closely “circling the target.” To give credit where it is due, the literature from hydrogeochemists, environmental chemists, and groundwater scientists most grabbed my attention. They are the ones sounding the alarm the loudest (and from whom we laid the foundation for the Geohydrological Shift Theory). They are clearly documenting rising nitrate levels, increasing salinity, changing ion composition, and most importantly, redox shifts in aquifers.
 Their cumulative argument is that water chemistry is changing at a planetary scale, and, as importantly, they elucidate the consequence: such water will affect soil chemistry, plant uptake, and microbial processes.
 The Hidden Lever: Themarox
 What pulled Matt and me into this was the chemistry of Themarox itself. Our early conversations, debates, and attempts to understand what it was doing to water gradually made it clear that we were not just looking at another agricultural input, but at a system-level intervention whose behavior did not fit within the current frameworks of agronomy or hydrogeochemistry.
 Just as we came to believe that understanding the science and methods behind Shimanishi’s achievement allowed us to extend origin-of-life research with the Rock–Water Circuit Theory, we now believe that what Themarox does to water lies outside the current awareness of those fields. And that realization is what ultimately changed my trajectory. This knowledge came to me first through Matt, and what followed, these months of trying to figure it out, was driven by the growing recognition that we were studying an intervention the world does not yet fully see.
 Thus, I want to help push the focus of the hydrogeochemistry field to study the potential of Themarox. Although they are rightly measuring and describing critical changes to the water system, they are not framing it as we are attempting to, which is that it is the root (or main) cause of the widespread biological dysfunction the other fields are describing.
 Right now, they are focused on reporting that “water quality is degrading,” but do not go on to say, “water chemistry is upstream of biological deterioration.” Most importantly, they are not aware that Themarox can restore that water to a state capable of reversing those downstream biological effects.
 The Regenerative Agriculture Practitioners
 Here, leading proponents like Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta, among others, are also rightly proposing a potentially complementary solution, namely that reducing inputs can actually lead to better outcomes, less pest pressure, more water retention in the soil, and ultimately, more resilient plants.
 They often say, similar to the other fields, “Fix the soil, and everything else follows.”
 But here again, they describe the fix as improving soil health, soil biology, and soil carbon, without a focus on the chemistry, ionic composition, and electrochemical behavior of water.
 Where We Are and Where We Should Go
 Collectively, at present, although numerous fields have repeatedly circled the problem, there is no unified framework that places water chemistry at the center of broad system dysfunction. The soil people write about how water movement matters, the biologists write about how the water medium matters, the chemists about how water composition is changing, and the farmers about how system behavior is shifting.
 Many fields have correctly identified that the problem lies upstream, but, in our opinion, they still point to the wrong thing. Some point to soil, others to biology, others to hydrology, but very few have followed the chain far enough to recognize that all three are downstream expressions of the ionic composition and electrochemical behavior of water itself.
 Such properties of water are literally the upstream regulators of soil structure, microbial behavior, and plant function.
 Ultimately, their solutions, like adding carbon, adding microbes, reducing chemicals, and optimizing irrigation, just do not go far enough upstream to change the water chemistry itself.
 The Solution Is Not Mine Alone
 At this point, instead of attempting to lay out a grand, fully formed solution, one in which agricultural systems worldwide are remediated through the treatment of irrigation, drinking, and surface waters, I’m going to shift gears. What I have tried to do here is define the problem, to make the case that water chemistry sits upstream of much of the dysfunction we are now observing.
 The next phase is not mine alone to solve. I am not a hydrogeologist, irrigation engineer, or water treatment expert, and I won’t pretend to be. My goal is to bring Themarox to the attention of those who are, so they can test it, challenge it, and, if warranted, figure out how it might be deployed at scale. That work lies ahead.
 For today, I am staying within the domain where I feel most comfortable offering guidance: the small grower, the home gardener, the hobby farmer, the orchardist. Because while large-scale systems may take time to shift, smaller ones can move now. So, for today, we start small.
 REVIVE: The Kory Resuscitation and Vitalization System for Soil and Garden Health
 Here we go again, with my tireless attempts to elevate my name into an eponym (hopefully understood for what it is - self-deprecating humor). Although agriculture has never quite leaned into eponyms the way medicine has, the pattern is there. Certain names have been fused to their central contributions, for instance, Liebig and his “law,” Borlaug and his wheat, Fukuoka and his natural farming, Steiner and his biodynamics, etc.
 They are not quite like “Koch’s postulates” or “Parkinson’s disease,” but it is close enough that I find myself with the mildly absurd notion that I might attach my own name to a way of thinking about water, soil, and life.
 So, as a former ICU specialist now self-proclaimed “agro-intensivist,” or more accurately and humbly, an “agro-educator,” but even there, that title has limitation because I have never farmed, potted, or even tended to a plant (remember, I am a city boy), thus I am writing and teaching a topic on which I have no “front-line experience.”
 Which gives me the creeps, honestly, because then I start to resemble the “desk doctors” of Covid, those who offered expert opinions and dictated policy while never having treated a single patient.
 Of course, Fauci comes to mind, but my most vivid memory is of Dr. Ashish Jha—a persistent media voice during Covid and head of Biden’s White House coronavirus response—who, when asked by Senator Ron Johnson in the very same hearing that I gave my ivermectin testimony, “Have you ever treated a Covid patient?” Jha paused and admitted, “I have not, sir.”
 I don’t want to be that guy.
 The difference here is I am openly stating what I do and do not know, which is simply that I had the fortune of coming across Shimanishi’s work, recognized its importance, and devoted now seven months of my life to studying it, discussing it, and spending many dozens of hours talking with those who have known of his work longer. Basically, I have learned a specific water chemistry, heretofore unknown to the wider world, and I have committed to disseminating that knowledge and its implications and potential.
 More recently, since starting the Asao Group , I have gotten to work with some amazing agronomists who have taught me about the use of a combination of agricultural inputs that can build back, revitalize, rescue, and reanimate soils, plants, grasses, and crops, whether they be houseplants, backyard gardens, hobby farms, or big farms.
 So, with that, let’s break down the first iteration of the REVIVE protocol (while also understanding that I will adapt and update the protocol as my experience and insights accumulate, similar to Paul’s and my approach with the protocols we created and evolved with our FLCCC in Covid.
 REVIVE: The Kory Resuscitation and Vitalization System for Soil and Garden Health
 As in critical care, there is no “one size fits all” with set doses, duration, and combinations; but you have to start with a core intervention to work from and then adapt and revise accordingly. As one of my new colleagues says, “Nature isn't exact; your approach doesn’t have to be either.”
 Thus, I encourage anyone to scale up or down in intensity based not only on the state and fertility of the starting soil but also on the response to therapy. However, note that the field trial I presented in the last post started with dead, infertile soil and relied solely on an initial cosmotropic water irrigation, followed by weekly foliar spraying, with the only addition being a one-time mid-season light application of fish hydrolysate and microbes. The results were beyond impressive despite starting from literal dead soil.
 The Trinity Of Recommended Inputs
 1) Cosmotropic Mineral Concentrate ( Primora Bio )
 Water treated with a biotite-derived vermiculite mineral extract, a mineral composition with “multiplicative” properties, meaning the addition of small amounts acts on large volumes of water, rendering a much larger water volume in a more electrochemically ordered state, which, across six studies in varied conditions and contexts, demonstrates changes in a multi-domain agricultural impact profile as per this AI-generated image below:

 2) Liquid Fish Hydrolysate Complex (Primora Nourish or equivalent)
 Liquid hydrolysate includes a wide range of minerals, micronutrients, amino acids, and fats which are known tot:

 3) Liquid Biochar (Primora Char or equivalent, e.g. American Biochar)
 Here, we use a 5-micron-sized activated wood biochar combined with humate, a size that allows for a liquid formulation, thus enabling all three inputs to be combined in a single application with a water sprayer:

 Sequence and Technique of Application
 1) Beginning of Season (Pre-Planting) Combination Soil Spray - Use All Three Interventions
 A) Cosmotropic Mineral Concentrate
 Seasonal soil spray frequency is once every 4-5 years. Recommend doing this for first year of protocol as it won’t hurt, but, depending on starting spoil, may not be necessary.
 Calculate the recommended amount of Primora Bio for the volume of water estimated for the area of your plot, garden, or farm. Note: the amount needed for the seasonal soil spray is much more than used in weekly or biweekly foliar spraying.

 B) Liquid Fish Hydrolysate:
 Calculate the recommended amount of liquid fish hydrolysate based on the required water volume, then add it to the water and stir.

 **Note: Fish hydrolysate should be done 2-4 more times this season for optimal results.
 C) Liquid Biochar
 Calculate the recommended amount of activated liquid biochar based on the required water volume, add it to the water, and stir.

 2) Pre-Germinate Seeds (apply only Primora Bio to water for the pre-germination step)
 Fill bowls with Primora Bio -treated water for each seed type appropriate for pre-germination. Add seeds to bowls of treated water as follows:

 3) Seed Planting
 Insert seeds in soil at depths appropriate for size (depth should be 2-3 times their diameter).

 4) Hydration During Germination Period

 4) Foliar Spraying With Primora Bio Every 7-14 Days

 Well, folks, I hope that was helpful. To all those who have gone “all in” and purchased one or all of these agricultural interventions, I wish you the absolute best growing season possible, and we at Asao Group look forward to hearing about all the amazing results!
 Primora Bio Control Trial Photo Contest
 To that end, several customers have already written in about plans to treat some of their pots, gardens, greenhouses, and even orchards with the REVIVE protocol (or some variation of it), compare them to the plants they have not treated, and then share their results with us.
 This is behavior we absolutely want to encourage, so this year we are holding a seasonal harvest photo contest, with which we will build "Use Case” page(s) on our website.
 We invite anyone interested to take serial photos this season to compare the speed of germination, growth, size, vigor, and color of their treated vs. untreated plants, and we will use those photos for our first Annual Photo contest below.
 Prizes
 Anybody who submits a comparison photo of even just a single treated plant vs. a non-treated plant will receive a 50% discount on their next purchase, up to a 3-quart bundle, and the three top photo entrants will receive a one-year supply!
 Please include documentation of the dates of soil spraying, planting, foliar spraying, and the date each photo was taken. Most importantly, please document what combinations of Primora Bio , Primora Char , and/or Primora Nourish that your plants were or were not treated with.
 See this example from Jeff of the Curious Outlier Substack of two basil plants after 18 days, published here :

 Invitation For Research Opportunities
 Now, for those who want to go “all-in,” venturing beyond photos, into carefully and serially measuring “hard data” at baseline and harvest, such as soil pH, soil nutrient levels, leaf nutrient levels, biomass levels, please email contact@primorabio.com. We would be happy to discuss the possibility of subsidizing your effort with product and/or funding, depending on research experiences, capabilities, and skills.

 *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
 Silly Humor Section:
 Check out virtual farmer Pierre working in his virtual garden this weekend:

 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: An ICU doctor’s obsession with restoring failing human systems led to something larger: a hidden shift in water, soil, and agriculture driving biological collapse—and a path to reverse it.


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!
 With that, I want to remind you that this weekend is our Spring Sale in celebration of World Water Day tomorrow: 25% off with code SPRINGSALE26 on single and paired bottles of Aurmina (drinking water) and Primora Bio (soil and foliar applications), plus additional discounts on a variety of bundles.

 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.
 *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

 Bonus fun: Video of me teaching Lisa the various Japanese bows we need to use next week:

 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: 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.