Water
Freshwater from salt water using only solar energy
A federally funded research effort to revolutionize water treatment has yielded an off-grid technology that uses energy from sunlight alone to turn salt water into fresh drinking water. The desalination system, which uses a combination of membrane distillation technology and light-harvesting Read More...
Billion-dollar dams are making water shortages, not solving them
Dams are supposed to collect water from rivers and redistribute it to alleviate water shortages, right? Not so fast. It turns out that in most cases they actually create water scarcity, especially for people living downstream. Almost a quarter of the global population experiences significant Read More...
These solar panels generate drinking water from the air
I've drank a lot of water from bottles, but it was never created like this. I'm on the rooftop of a building in Santa Monica on an overcast day, checking out solar panels from a company called Zero Mass Water. These are not just your typical energy creating panels - they are busy pulling Read More...
How NASA's satellites can help solve the Middle East water crisis
For at least six of the past 10 years, Ali Saed, a farmer, grew no crops. The rain in his little corner of northern Iraq was too meager, as was the flow of a nearby irrigation canal. He was only a few months away from ditching agriculture for good when he reached out to a distant relative, a Read More...
There’s as much water in Earth’s mantle as in all the oceans
The deep Earth holds about the same amount of water as our oceans. That’s the conclusion from experiments on rocks typical of those in the mantle transition zone, a global buffer layer 410 to 660 kilometres beneath us that separates the upper from the lower mantle. “If our estimation is Read More...
Squeezing every drop of fresh water from waste brine
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Engineers at the University of California, Riverside have developed a new way to recover almost 100 percent of the water from highly concentrated salt solutions. The system will alleviate water shortages in arid regions and reduce concerns surrounding high salinity brine Read More...
Where Nestlé guzzles water, Michigan neighbors take exception
“Having anybody take away some of the very best water that should be going into the creeks and the Muskegon River and eventually Lake Michigan, that’s a big deal,” said Jeff Ostahowski, vice president of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, who lives 25 miles from Evart. Read More...
Researchers develop low-cost purification system that uses CO2 gas to clean water
The problem with most water purification methods is that they become clogged and need to be replaced over time. A new technology developed by researchers at Princeton University doesn’t require filters at all, instead relying on the injection of CO2 gas to change the water’s chemistry and Read More...
Turning goats into water: A solution for the desert
One woman's clever idea for how to pay for water Read More...
MIT scientists have developed low-energy process for cleaning polluted water
Scientists at MIT have created an electrochemical process able to selectively get rid of organic pollutants in water, which can be harmful even in minimal amounts. Typically, a lot of energy or chemicals are required to remove dangerous contaminants, but this new process is different, relying on a Read More...