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Scientists Discover a Game-Changing Way To Remove Salt From Water
[T]he ability to quickly and easily desalinate water has long been a goal of scientists around the world. And now, a group of researchers from Columbia University believe they've found a way to do it. The process is called Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction (TSSE) and it's designed to purify hypersaline brines (water that contains a high concentration of salts, making it up to seven times as salty as seawater). This kind of waste water is produced by industrial processes and during oil and gas production and it poses a major pollution risk to groundwater.
The research team, led by Columbia Engineering's assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering Ngai Yin Yip, mixed a solvent (dyed red) in with a sample of hypersaline brine (dyed blue). The liquids appear to stay separated in the jar, but after heating them, and then decanting the red solvent into another jar to be heated separately, the team was left with a layer of clear water. While the science is complicated, the above video shows the process in a pretty simple way (no chemistry PhD required). What's most exciting about the process is its implications. The team was able to remove up to 98.4% of the salt, which is comparable to the current "gold standard" process, reverse osmosis. But unlike reverse osmosis or other methods of desalination, this process doesn't require high temperatures or high pressures -- just a low-grade heat of less than 70C (158F).
The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
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| cauz |
May 8, 2019, 9:24 a.m. |
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| Sergio Garcia |
When it comes to hitting solid drives, the secret is to swing within yourself. I know that sounds like a cliche, but it's true. If you swing at 100 miles per hour and hit it on the toe, you won't hit the ball as far as you would with an 80-mph swing that catches the ball in the center of the clubface. |
| Pope John Paul II |
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. |
| Warren Farrell |
Women are the only 'oppressed' group that is able to buy most of the $10 billion worth of cosmetics each year; the only oppressed group that spends more on high fashion, brand-name clothing than its oppressors; the only oppressed group that watches more TV. |
| Garet Garrett |
The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world. |
| Aravind Adiga |
Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French. |
| Andrew Carnegie |
Concentration is my motto - first honesty, then industry, then concentration. |
| Virchand Gandhi |
All religions worthy of the name are now making great efforts to purify their doctrines and return to their original standpoint, all except Christianity! You surely know that the nineteenth century Christianity is not the religion taught by Christ. Christ's religion has been changed and corrupted. |
| Ben Affleck |
I went to the University of Vermont because I had a kind of unrequited love for this high school girlfriend. She wasn't even at the University but at another school nearby. But I thought if went to a school near her, just maybe... I was really remedial about girls in so many ways. |
| Anant Agarwal |
A large number of students around the world don't really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities. |
| Conrad Hall |
The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move. |
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Salt Makes You Hungry, Not Thirsty, Study Says
Salty diet makes you hungry, not thirsty. Science Daily reports: "In a study carried out during a simulated mission to Mars, an international group of scientists has found exactly the opposite to be true. 'Cosmonauts' who ate more salt retained more water, weren't as thirsty, and needed more energy." So if you don't want to gain weight on your trip to Mars, don't eat salty chips. If you don't want to gain weight at home, maybe you should stay away from them as well.
From the report: "The studies were carried out by Natalia Rakova (MD, PhD) of the Charite and MDC and her colleagues. The subjects were two groups of 10 male volunteers sealed int...
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New Chemical Process Can Convert Nearly a Quarter of All Plastic Waste Into Fuel
"Researchers at Purdue University have developed a new chemical process that they say can convert approximately one-quarter of the world's plastic waste into gasoline and diesel-like fuels," writes Slashdot reader dmoberhaus. Motherboard explains how it works:
As detailed in a paper published this week in Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, the chemists discovered a way to convert polypropylene -- a type of plastic commonly used in toys, medical devices, and product packaging like potato chip bags -- into gasoline and diesel-like fuel. The researchers said that this fuel is pure enough to be used as blends...
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I had a dream my friend and I were walking quickly across the surface of a lake in the dark. There were long skinny strands of leafy plants just barely under the surface of the water and it almost looked like they were providing a path but our feet didn't touch them. Our feet only touched the surface of the water. It seemed like we were trying to carefully escape something but we were afraid we might break the surface of the water.
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Scientists Find Way To Make Mineral Which Can Remove CO2 From Atmosphere
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org:
Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston. Now, for the first time, researchers have explained how magnesite forms at low temperature, and offered a route to dramatically accelerating its crystallization. A tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite can remove around half...
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Enormous water worlds appear to be common throughout the Milky Way. The planets, which are up to 50% water by mass and 2-3 times the size of Earth, account for nearly one-third of known exoplanets.
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Researchers Are Working With NASA To See If Comedians Help Team Cohesion On Long Space
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian:
[R]esearchers have found that the success of a future mission to the red planet may depend on the ship having a class clown. "These are people that have the ability to pull everyone together, bridge gaps when tensions appear and really boost morale," said Jeffrey Johnson, an anthropologist at the University of Florida. "When you're living with others in a confined space for a long period of time, such as on a mission to Mars, tensions are likely to fray. It's vital you have somebody who can help everyone get along, so they can do their jobs and get ...
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I had a nightmare that I was in this botanical garden and water was rising out of the ground. It just kept getting higher and higher until almost everything was underwater. There were these huge monstera leaves on the surface of the water but you could see that there were huge angler fish under the water and some of the leaves were attached to them like the light would normally be. I was trying to jump across the leaves to get out of the park and trying not to step on the wrong ones. I was balancing on some bars over the water.
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A dream from 2012:
"I'm in my old neighbor's kitchen and [this guy from work] is there making breakfast. He's putting some water like substance in a plastic case with different compartments. Then he put egg in one compartment and mixed it up. The water like substance and the egg did not mix and then he took the egg out with a fork and looked really proud of himself."
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I had a dream that I was terminally ill or something and I was in a hospital and I had to go to this other hospital and my doctor was like "come on we gotta fly there" and he jumped out the window. Then I followed him and we had to meditate in order to fly and we were spinning around and flying over this body of water. I couldn't keep my focus so I fell into the water from pretty high up. It was scary.
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Hacked Water Heaters Could Trigger Mass Blackouts Someday
At the Usenix Security conference this week, a group of Princeton University security researchers will present a study that considers a little-examined question in power grid cybersecurity: What if hackers attacked not the supply side of the power grid, but the demand side? From a report:
In a series of simulations, the researchers imagined what might happen if hackers controlled a botnet composed of thousands of silently hacked consumer internet of things devices, particularly power-hungry ones like air conditioners, water heaters, and space heaters. Then they ran a series of software simulations to see how many of those devices a...
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