These Gorgeous Water Maps Are Helping Identify Fake Scotch and Murder Victims

One of the criteria that make a Scotch a Scotch is that it’s made with Scottish water. That means that a clever connoisseur should be able to tell whether her drink is authentic by tracing the source of its H2O molecules. But how? After it’s collected and filtered of impurities, water is water, right?

Not exactly. The elements hydrogen and oxygen appear in nature in various forms, called isotopes, which differ in neutron number. By measuring the relative abundance of these isotopes