What are Osmosis and Hypo/Hyper/Isotonic Solutions? And how do they work?
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Imagine pure distilled water. Now imagine dissolving salts in it. You could put a tiny bit, a larger pinch or an entire bowl of salt and dissolve in the water.
Now, due to complex chemical and physical reactions, if you separate two chambers of water by a semi-permeable membrane, and the chambers have water of different salt concentration, water naturally goes from low tonicity to high tonicity until they equal in concentration.
Ancient microbes exploit this, and this is literally how life on earth functions. Cell membranes are semi permeable and allow nutrient exchange using osmosis (I’m ELI5ing here).
The chamber with higher concentration is called hypertonic and the one with lower concentration is hypotonic. They both eventually become isotonic (equal concentration) if left undisturbed.
I made one crucial simplification by calling the above tonic instead of osmolar, but in ELI5 context, it should be hopefully okay.
Finally, we also use the reverse of the osmosis process to purify water from sea water. Basically, we can use electricity to force the reverse flow of water from high sanity to low salinity to end up with pure water. RO treatment plants use this principle.
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