Established in the 1960s India's space programme has focused so far on aiding the country's development building satellites to spot potential sources of groundwater and monitor deforestation.
which discovered water on the lunar surface but died more than a year early because its electronics could not withstand the heat radiated from the moon.
or perhaps water in Mars's and recently NASA's Curiosity rover added to the scepticism by finding no methane when it breathed in the Martian air.
MOM may also help reveal how Mars became a cold dry planet with an atmosphere too thin to support liquid water for long periods.
Gaping canyons and river-like channels point to large amounts of water and therefore a thick warming atmosphere in the past.
Because Venus is closer to the sun the solar wind might have stripped gaseous water from its early atmosphere leaving a thick haze of mostly carbon dioxide that turned the planet's surface into a hellish desert.
whether its surface would be warm enough to support liquid water. But it is clear from our solar system that a lot of other factors come into play says Schneider d
All the signs are had that Mars plentiful slightly salty water that could have supported primitive microbes. The hope is that Mars can help us understand the origins of life
According to Curiosity's onboard chemistry lab the sample is between 20 and 30 per cent smectite a clay mineral that forms in the presence of water.
The instruments also detected minerals indicating that this water was ph neutral and carried substances capable of supplying microbes with energy.
if this water had been around and you had been on the planet you would have been able to drink it says rover project scientist John Grotzinger.
which form in the presence of water scattered throughout Yellowknife Bay. The thinking is that Mars would have had liquid water billions of years ago around the time Earth was playing host to early life.
But at some point Mars dried out and lost much of its atmosphere. The planet also only briefly had a magnetic field to protect its surface from cosmic radiation
Paradoxically water which is necessary for life is a mild oxidant and can break down organic carbon says Grotzinger.
enough water for microbes to thrive in; and minerals that could act like batteries allowing electrons to flow
which forms in the presence of water. More importantly they found calcium sulphate salts which form in non-acidic water.
All these clues point to ancient Mars hosting neutral slightly salty liquid water that could have supported primitive life.
if this water had been around and you had been on the planet you would have been able to drink it.
The rover used the drill bit at the end of its robotic arm to make a hole 1. 6 centimetres wide and 6. 4 centimetres deep in a flat veined outcrop thought to have once been saturated with water.
that the height from which a filament is deployed does not influence its coiling patterns good news for ships that navigate choppy waters to deploy fiber-optic cables. his is important because,
which consists of six pumps that expel water through rubber tubes. Two of those tubes vent on the side of the robot opposite the flattened panel
The control algorithm constantly adjusts the velocity of the water pumped through each of the six jets to keep the robot on course.
the material can even direct water upward against gravity. Each microhair made of nickel is about 70 microns high and 25 microns wide about one-fourth the diameter of a human hair.
Tilting toward a fieldin experiments the team piped a water solution through a syringe and onto the microhair array.
Through a combination of surface tension and tilting pillars water climbed up the array following the direction of the pillars.
they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water,
When droplets of water or tiny particles are placed on the surface a thin coating of the fluid covers them forming a magnetic cloak.
But at present even in desert locations the only way to counter this fouling is to hose the arrays down a labor-and water-intensive method.
The new approach the researchers say could lead to systems that make the cleaning process automatic and water-free.
Watch a water droplet get pulled across an active surface designed by MIT researchers. Video:
insulating material structure that floats on water. When sunlight hits the structure surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite,
drawing water up through the material pores, where it evaporates as steam. The brighter the light, the more steam is generated.
The latter approach involves mixing water with nanoparticles that heat up quickly when exposed to sunlight, vaporizing the surrounding water molecules as steam.
But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy about 1, 000 times that of an average sunny day.
The foam also contains very small pores that allow water to creep up through the structure via capillary action.
generating a pressure gradient that draws water up through the carbon foam. As water seeps into the graphite layer,
the heat concentrated in the graphite turns the water into steam. The structure works much like a sponge that,
when placed in water on a hot, sunny day, can continuously absorb and evaporate liquid.
The researchers tested the structure by placing it in a chamber of water and exposing it to a solar simulator a light source that simulates various intensities of solar radiation.
They found they were able to convert 85 percent of solar energy into steam at a solar intensity 10 times that of a typical sunny day.
#Getting a charge out of water droplets Last year MIT researchers discovered that when water droplets spontaneously jump away from superhydrophobic surfaces during condensation they can gain electric charge in the process.
Now the same team has demonstrated that this process can generate small amounts of electricity that might be used to power electronic devices.
False-color time-lapse images captured#via#high-speed imaging show a droplet jumping (colored green) from a superhydrophobic copper oxide fin to a hydrophilic (water-attracting) copper fin (colored orange.
Water will condense out from the atmosphere it happens naturally he says. The atmosphere is a huge source of power
just as water condenses from warm humid air on the outside of a cold glass. Chuanhua Duan an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University who was involved not in this research says This work provides a new approach for energy harvesting
and water Whenever there is a major spill of oil into water the two tend to mix into a suspension of tiny droplets called an emulsion that is extremely hard to separate and that can cause severe damage to ecosystems.
and could process large quantities of the finely mixed materials back into pure oil and water.
In addition to its possible role in cleaning up spills the new method could also be used for routine drilling such as in the deep ocean as well as on land where water is injected into wells to help force oil out of deep rock formations.
and water that s extracted is put in large tanks to allow separation by gravity; the oil gradually floats to the top where it can be skimmed off.
That works well when the oil and water are already large globs of stuff already partly separated Varanasi says.
what is called an emulsion with very tiny droplets of oil stabilized in a water background or water in an oil background.
but people know it s hidden in the water in these fine emulsions. In the case of land-based drilling where so-called produced water from wells contains fine emulsions of oil companies sometimes simply dilute the water until it meets regulatory standards for being discharged into waterways.
It s a problem that s very challenging to the industry Varanasi says both in terms of recovering the oil
and more importantly not discharging the produced water into the environment. Tiny droplets of water colored blue are suspended in oil on top of a membrane developed by the MIT team.
Thanks to the membrane's tiny pores with a special coating that attracts water and repels oil the droplets shrink as they pass through the membrane ultimately leaving just pure oil behind.
A similar membrane with a different coating can do the reverse allowing oil droplets to pass
while blocking water. Video courtesy of the researchers The new approach developed by Varanasi s group uses membranes with hierarchical pore structures.
and repel water or vice versa. This allows one material to pass while blocking the other with little flow resistance Varanasi says.
or repel oil and water. The skin layer thickness can be optimized further using polymeric pore formers to enhance throughput.
Microscopy images show the membrane in operation with dye added to the water to make the droplets more obvious.
Within seconds an oil-water mixture that is heavily clouded becomes perfectly clear as the water passes through the membrane leaving pure oil behind.
Oil-water nanoemulsions are ubiquitous in a number of industries and these membranes could enable rapid separation of those emulsions with high purity and efficiency.
Leaks in water pipes can waste up to half the water in a system; oil-pipeline leaks can lead to toxic spills and prolonged, expensive cleanup operations.
and should be effective in gas, water, and oil pipes. MIT mechanical engineering professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi, a co-author of the research papers,
Think of the electricity as water being transferred via bucket from a full tank to an empty tank
In that analogy, the bucket is the adapter that collects the water (electricity) from a full tank (outlet) and dumps it into an empty tank (laptop battery.
say, a gallon of water per minute from the full tank to the empty tank,
Sagneri says. ee delivering that same amount of water, in that same time frame, but 1, 000 times faster.
But it s essential that you put the kettle on the stove before pouring the water into the cup.
and uses it to heat water for homes. The two other audience choice awards went to REECYCLE,
and allow reuse of about 25 percent of their water. It could also eliminate 10 trucks of wastewater shipping per day for Lagunitas.
and reusing water easier and more affordable, as America dependence on water increases, along with water pollution. lmost every product we make has a water footprint,
Silver says. s our economy grows, water tables are dropping and wastewater pollution is rising, causing many companies to consider water risk in their overall strategy.
The need for more cost-effective solutions is increasingly acute in the developed world and also critical in the developing world.
We are leveraging biotechnology to provide the highest return on investment for managing water. To that end, Cambrian is working on other projects that leverage exoelectrogenic microbes to treat wastewater.
One project, called Biovolt, is powered a self water treatment system for U s army forward operating bases that treats wastewater
for the agricultural industry. arth as a spaceshipecovolt is valuable today as a solution to Earth water issues.
and they provide their own power source and water distribution. Strano and the paper lead author, postdoc and plant biologist Juan Pablo Giraldo, envision turning plants into self-powered, photonic devices such as detectors for explosives or chemical weapons.
A new version of the fish that should be able to swim continuously for around 30 minutes will use pumped water instead of carbon dioxide to inflate the channels
#Researchers find that going with the flow makes bacteria Stick in a surprising new finding researchers have discovered that bacterial movement is impeded in flowing water enhancing the likelihood that the microbes will attach to surfaces.
The effect of flowing water on bacterial swimming was a complete surprise Stocker says. My own earlier predictions of what would happen
when microbes swim in flowing water had been: Nothing too interesting he adds. It was only when Roberto
Nonliving particles of similar size and shape show no such effect the team found nor do nonmotile bacteria that are swept along passively by the water.
and online access in an area where most people lack electricity or piped water. There students and monks will be able to learn from materials such as lectures on MIT s Opencourseware (with added Tibetan subtitles.
when youe near water or worrying about components getting lost or broken or stolen. So there are some important practical considerations as well.
The device can also now be submerged in water for maritime use. ialing in the specs has been a continual process,
The MIT team found that they could create novel sensors by coating the nanotubes with specifically designed amphiphilic polymers polymers that are drawn to both oil and water, like soap.
#Droplets break a theoretical time barrier on bouncing Those who study hydrophobic materials water-shedding surfaces such as those found in nature
and created in the laboratory are familiar with a theoretical limit on the time it takes for a water droplet to bounce away from such a surface.
the conventional wisdom holds, is to minimize interaction between the water and the surface, such as by creating low-adhesion superhydrophobic surfaces.
limiting the likelihood that water will spread out over the wings and curtail their aerodynamic properties a clear survival advantage.
if water builds up on their surfaces. f you can make the blades stay dry longer,
recent MIT Phd recipient Hyuk-Min Kwon and former MIT postdoc J. C. Bird, was to find a way to increase the temperature at which water droplets start bouncing.
When they sprayed water on their micro-nano surfaces at 400 C the highest temperature their experimental setup could provide the droplets quickly wet the surfaces and boiled.
sprouts a thicket of polymers that attract water, creating an impenetrable barrier for microbes. Its chemical makeup also mimics that of cells important to homeostasis,
The researchers also used their new system to monitor human embryonic kidney cells as pure water was added to their environment a shock that forces the cells to absorb water
The process involves combining oil with water under such high pressures and temperatures that they mix together, molecule by molecule,
and the role played by the water in breaking apart the heavy oil compounds and shifting the sulfur into easily removable gases.
and water to promote the desired reactions critical guidance for the design of commercial-scale reactors.
One approach calls for using water rather than natural gas as the source of the hydrogen molecules needed for key chemical reactions in the refining process.
Ordinarily, oil and water won mix, so the molecules can eeone another and chemically react.
at pressures and temperatures above 220 atm and 375 degrees Celsius water goes into a supercritical state in
Add oil to supercritical water (SCW) and stir, and the two will mix together perfectly,
In one, they heated hexyl sulfide without adding water; in the other, they mixed the hexyl sulfide with SCW.
Since water is the only source of oxygen in the mixture, it must be reacting with the carbon compounds.
In the absence of water, that highly reactive sulfur-bearing molecule would join with others like itself to form a long chain
But in the presence of water, it reacts with the water, and the products ultimately include lighter hydrocarbons that are converted readily into valuable light fuels.
Those results define for the first time the key roles played by water in the SCW system. e confirmed that the hydrogen atoms needed to convert the sulfur to hydrogen sulfide can be provided by water rather than by hydrogen gas,
The oil enters the cross section at the top and water at the bottom. As the spinning vortices form, the oil is driven downward near the center of the pipe,
and the water is driven upward along the walls. In the first cross section, the interface layer between the oil
and extract a variety of contaminants from soil and water. Ferdinand Brandl and Nicolas Bertrand
When they learned that UV LIGHT was used to disinfect water in certain treatment plants, they began to ask a different question. e thought
or hormones from water, because we saw that the particles aggregate once you irradiate them with UV LIGHT. trap for ater-fearingpollutionthe researchers synthesized polymers from polyethylene glycol,
and dispersed evenly in water. But when exposed to UV LIGHT, the stabilizing outer shell of the particles is shed,
Due to the excessive use of fertilizers, our groundwater is contaminated with nitrates, which pose a problem
The preparation of such polymer vesicles with water-soluble host receptors was done by using a mixture of two different block copolymers.
because they are synthesized by adding the tin alkoxide precursor into boiling water followed by heat treatment Pol said.
This is very straightforward rapid'cooking'of a metal-organic precursor in boiling water. The precursor compound is a solid tin alkoxide a material analogous to cost-efficient and broadly available titanium alkoxides.
Peidong Yang Bin Liu and colleagues note that harnessing sunlight to split water and harvest hydrogen is one of the most intriguing ways to achieve clean energy.
which only emit water when driven. But making hydrogen which mostly comes from natural gas requires electricity from conventional carbon dioxide-emitting power plants.
Producing hydrogen at low cost from water using the clean energy from the sun would make this form of energy
when immersed in water and exposed to sunlight produces hydrogen gas. The scientists say that the technique could allow their technology to be scaled up at low cost.
thus be practical both in medical research as well as for diagnosis. The conversion of hydrogen peroxide to water,
The second is the dispersion of alkaline nanoparticles in either short chain alcohols or water for the ph control of movable works of art such as paper parchment and leather.
We also came up with nanostructured cleaning fluids such as oil-in-water microemulsions for the removal of dirt and unwanted coatings on works of art.
Finally we developed containers such as chemical gels for the delivery and controlled release of the cleaning fluids on water-sensitive surfaces such as paper parchment and leather.
It is well known that in the presence of light and water, these particles can form dangerous, highly reactive chemicals called free radicals that can damage DNA.
Cao's team has developed a technique that takes advantage of the Mos2's physical properties to transfer the thin film using only room-temperature water a tissue and a pair of tweezers.
Mos2 is hydrophobic-it repels water. But the sapphire substrate the thin film is grown on is hydrophilic-it attracts water.
Cao's new transfer technique works by applying a drop of water to the thin film
and then poking the edge of the film with tweezers or a scalpel so that the water can begin to penetrate between the Mos2 and the sapphire.
Once it has begun to penetrate the water pushes into the gap floating the thin film on top.
The researchers use a tissue to soak up the water and then lift the thin film with tweezers and place it on a flexible substrate.
The whole process takes a couple of minutes. Chemical etching takes hours. The water breaks the adhesion between the substrate
and the thin film-but it's important to remove the water before moving the film Cao says.
Otherwise capillary action would case the film to buckle or fold when you pick it up.
or desalinization because it remains stable in water without breaking up or dissolving. In addition because the material is extremely flexible it can be rolled into a tube
Both drugs are hydrophobic meaning they dislike water and shy away from it. PEG though is hydrophilic:
When exposed to water it stretches out to maximize contact while the T-shaped joints that hold the CPT tug in the opposite direction and fold inward.
A liquid like water is about as viscous for these devices as honey or even tar is for us.
These have characteristics that distinguish them from water. Most bodily fluids have the property that their viscosity changes depending on the speed of movement says Fischer.
but previous studies determined the material's edges are highly efficient catalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) a process used in fuel cells to pull hydrogen from water.
It catalyzes the separation of hydrogen from water when exposed to a current. Its performance as a HER generator is as good as any molybdenum disulfide structure that has ever been seen
This geometry now determines the efficiency nanoparticle use as a chemical sensor in sensing minute quantities of chemicals in air and water.
#Team reveals molecular structure of water at gold electrodes When a solid material is immersed in a liquid the liquid immediately next to its surface differs from that of the bulk liquid at the molecular level.
Now for the first time researchers at the US Department of energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have observed the molecular structure of liquid water at a gold surface under different charging conditions.
With gold as a chemically inert electrode and slightly-saline water as an electrolyte Salmeron and colleagues used a new twist on x-ray absorption spectroscopy XAS) to probe the interface
or a tenth of a micrometer) x-ray transparent window with a thin coating of gold (20nm) on a sealed liquid sample holder the Berkeley Lab team was able to expose water molecules in the liquid to x-rays
Upon absorbing an x-ray photon the excited water molecule can spew (emit) either charged particles (electrons) or light (photons.
because electrons emitted from x-ray excited water molecules travel only nanometer distances through matter. The electrons arriving at the gold electrode surface can be detected as an electrical current traveling through a wire attached to it.
These experiments result in absorption vs. x-ray energy curves (spectra) that reflect how water molecules within nanometers of the gold surface absorb the x-rays.
's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) he conducted large molecular dynamics simulations of the gold-water interface
It turns out that for a neutral gold surface a significant number of water molecules (H2o) next to the gold surface orient with hydrogen (H) atoms pointing toward the gold.
Water molecules are bound together by so-called hydrogen bonds which orient the slightly positively charged H atoms in each molecule towards the slightly negatively charged oxygen (O) atoms of neighboring molecules.
what holds water molecules together to make a liquid under conditions of temperature and pressure that we consider comfortable as humans.
It is perhaps surprising that the inert gold surface can induce significant numbers of water molecules not to hydrogen-bond to each other
Furthermore positively charged gold ions cause water molecules to orient their H atoms away from the gold
how many water molecules are tilted one way or another and if their hydrogen bonds are broken or not concludes Salmeron.
Water next to the electrode has a different molecular structure than it would in the absence of the electrode.
The second is that in the calculations the change in the structure of water is limited to the first two molecular layers above the surface
This study which is reported in Science in a paper titled The structure of interfacial water on gold electrodes studied by x-ray absorption spectroscopy marks the first time that the scientific community has shown such high sensitivity in an in-situ environment under working electrode conditions s
The most widely used thermal fluids are water, ethylene glycol, thermal oils and molten salts. One characteristic that is common to all of them, according to Juliá, is"their low thermal conductivity,
Into that we load a water based solution and introduce an additive which allows us to tune the buoyant density of the solution itself he explains.
It turns out that carbon nanomaterials are hydrophobic so water will roll right off of them he says.
and water said Shengyan (Sandy) Liu a Phd candidate at Waterloo's Faculty of engineering who led the team of researchers from the Department of Chemical engineering and the Centre for Contact lens Research.
and measured their concentrations in the water soil and living organisms during the course of a year.
because burning hydrogen fuel emits only water vapor.""Many researchers are looking to inorganic materials for new sources of energy,
They also know that water can be split into oxygen and hydrogen by combining these proteins with titanium dioxide
On the macroscale adding fluorine atoms to carbon-based materials makes for water-repellant nonstick surfaces such as Teflon.
so understanding and manipulating surface properties friction adhesion interactions with water catalysis are major ongoing areas of scientific research.
This protein concentration is similar to one drop of milk dissolved in a hundred tons of water.
Professor Li has invented a cost-effective and scalable way to split graphite into microscopic graphene sheets and dissolve them in water.
Now we have a rational way of controlling this assembly in a water-based system he says.
Our group discovered a way to use sphere packing to get all sorts of materials to behave themselves in a water solution before they are sprayed onto surfaces in thin layers and assembled into a module.
because we use water instead of dangerous solvents in the process he adds. For photovoltaics Venkataraman points out The next thing is to make devices with other polymers coming along to increase power conversion efficiency
and produce roll-to-roll manufactured materials with water. We expect to actually get much greater efficiency.
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