#Bacteria could help clean groundwater contaminated by uranium ore processing A team of Rutgers University scientists
Array"After the newly discovered bacteria interact with uranium compounds in water the uranium becomes immobile,
"It is dissolved no longer in the groundwater and therefore can't contaminate drinking water brought to the surface."
Scientists had witnessed previously decreasing concentrations of uranium in groundwater when iron-breathing bacteria were active,
What Kerkhof is optimistic about is the potential for these bacteria to mitigate the specific groundwater pollution problem in Rifle.
Scientists at first expected the groundwater to flush into the Colorado river and carry the dissolved uranium with it,
he said there's potentially a lot of water to be concerned about. And the problem could spread beyond traditional places such as ore processing sites."
"so places like the Middle east that are experiencing war could be exposed to high levels of uranium in the groundwater
and are increasing in coastal waters worldwide, "says study co-author, Dr Amelia Wenger.""Fish gills are in direct contact with their environment
but they say the problem isn't limited to Australian waters. Coastal oceans affected by suspended sediment tend to overlap critical fish habitats and nurseries.
Juvenile reef fish are exposed often to sediment as they swim in open waters before settling on a chosen reef.
#Single-catalyst water splitter produces clean-burning hydrogen 24/7 Array'We have developed a low-voltage, single-catalyst water splitter that continuously generates hydrogen and oxygen for more than 200 hours,
an exciting world-record performance,'said study co-author Yi Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
In an engineering first, Cui and his colleagues used lithium-ion battery technology to create one low-cost catalyst that is capable of driving the entire water-splitting reaction.'
'Our hope is that this technique will lead to the discovery of new catalysts for other reactions beyond water splitting.'
As an alternative, scientists have been trying to develop a cheap and efficient way to extract pure hydrogen from water.
A conventional water-splitting device consists of two electrodes submerged in a water-based electrolyte.
But in 2014, Stanford chemist Hongjie Dai developed a water splitter made of inexpensive nickel and iron that runs on an ordinary 1. 5-volt battery.
'Our water splitter is unique, because we only use one catalyst, nickel-iron oxide, for both electrodes,'said graduate student Haotian Wang,
'This bifunctional catalyst can split water continuously for more than a week with a steady input of just 1. 5 volts of electricity.
That's an unprecedented water-splitting efficiency of 82 percent at room temperature.''In conventional water splitters, the hydrogen and oxygen catalysts often require different electrolytes with different phone acidic,
one alkaline--to remain stable and active.''For practical water splitting, an expensive barrier is needed to separate the two electrolytes,
adding to the cost of the device, 'Wang said.''But our single-catalyst water splitter operates efficiently in one electrolyte with a uniform ph.'Wang
and his colleagues discovered that nickel-iron oxide, which is cheap and easy to produce,
'We built a conventional water splitter with two benchmark catalysts, one platinum and one iridium,
'At first the device only needed 1. 56 volts of electricity to split water, but within 30 hours we had to increase the voltage nearly 40 percent.
interconnected grain boundaries that become active sites for the water-splitting catalytic reaction, 'Cui said.'
water-soluble QDS in the July 1 issue of the journal Green Chemistry. This is the first example of engineers harnessing nature's unique ability to achieve cost effective and scalable manufacturing of QDS using a bacterial process.
The solution yields extracellular, water-soluble quantum dots from low-cost precursors at ambient temperatures and pressure.
mineral-rich water released at mid-ocean vents that then precipitated to the ocean floor. Now Johnson and Li
and gave us an independent measure of the amount coming from shallow continental waters that carried an isotopic signature of life."
#Eco-friendly oil spill solution developed An eco-friendly biodegradable green'herding'agent that can be used to clean up light crude oil spills on water has been developed by researchers.
City College of New york researchers led by chemist George John have developed an eco-friendly biodegradable green"herding"agent that can be used to clean up light crude oil spills on water.
a doctoral student in Matyjaszewski's lab."The pores can hold large amounts of water, but if you remove this water to study them,
the pores collapse and you can't map them.""He and his collaborators were able to characterize the 3dom hydrogels using an indirect electron microscopy method.
When mixed with a few tablespoons of water and swallowed these particles attach themselves to potassium ions in the lower part of the colon,
"Arrayunfortunately, the addition of nanodiamonds did not address the material's aversion to water. The simulations showed that water suppresses the formation of scrolls by increasing the adhesion of graphene to the surface.
While this greatly limits the hybrid material's potential applications, its ability to maintain superlubricity in dry environments is a significant breakthrough in itself.
For their part, the Argonne team will continue its computational studies to look for ways to overcome the barrier presented by water."
if we can incorporate something hydrophobic that would keep water out, "Sankaranarayanan said.""As long as you can repel water,
the graphene nanoscrolls could potentially work in humid environments as well.""Arraythe team's groundbreaking nanoscroll discovery would not have been possible without a supercomputer like Mira.
--and protein-appended molecules that form water channels that transfer water at the rate of natural membranes,
"The researchers developed a second-generation synthetic water channel that improves on earlier attempts to mimic aquaporins--natural water channel proteins--by being more stable and easier to manufacture.
"We were surprised to see transport rates approaching the'holy grail'number of a billion water molecules per channel per second,
"The researchers consider that the PAP membranes are an order of magnitude better than the first-generation artificial water channels reported to date.
#California's Drought Is Part of a Much Bigger Water Crisis Why do I keep hearing about the California drought,
"Pretty much every state west of the Rockies has been facing a water shortage of one kind or another in recent years.
Wyoming, Colorado, New mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California all share water from the Colorado river, a hugely important water resource that sustains 40 million people in those states, supports 15 percent of the nation's food supply,
and fills two of largest water reserves in the country. The severe shortages of rain and snowfall have hurt California's $46 billion agricultural industry
and helped raise national awareness of the longer-term shortages that are affecting the entire Colorado river basin.
and ordered cities and towns to cut water use by as much as 36 percent. Those who don't comply with the cuts will face fines,
while water shortages are making firefighters'jobs even harder. And a little bit of rain won't help.
"Killing the Colorado"has shown that people are entitled to more water from the Colorado than has flowed through it, on average, over the last 110 years.
Meanwhile much of the water is lost, overused or wasted, stressing both the Colorado system, and trickling down to California,
Explosive urban growth matched with the steady planting of water-thirsty crops which use the majority of the water don't help.
Arcane laws actually encourage farmers to take even more water from the Colorado river and from California's rivers than they actually need,
and federal subsidies encourage farmers to plant some of the crops that use the most water.
And, as Propublica has reported, it seems that"the engineering that made settling the West possible may have reached the bounds of its potential"eaning that even the big dams
and canals we built to ferry all this water may now be causing more harm than good.
Water use policieserhaps more than natureave caused the water crisis in the West. As the former Arizona governor and U s. Secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt told Propublica:"
"There is enough water in the West but there are all kinds of agriculture efficiencies that have not been put into place."
When officials divvied up rights to Colorado river water nearly a century ago, it happened to be a wetter period than usual.
and states are stillclaiming the same amount of water from the Colorado river that they always have hich is 1. 4 trillion gallons a year more than the river actually produces.
when it comes to water."("Yuhas made the unfortunate mistake of complaining on social media that he
and his neighbors deserve more water because they pay more property taxes, and"should not be forced togolf on brown lawns,
To the uninitiated,"water law"is arcane and confusingence the need for, yes, water lawyers.
Sometimes, water law seems to defy common sense. For instance, in Colorado, if you put a barrel in your yard to collect rainwater for your plants,
under water law,"nearly every drop is spoken for.""But the underlying rule of water in the West is that the first people to show up
and claim it were the first people to get it, and everyone who came after took a place further back in line.
Called"prior appropriation,"this remains the dominant thread in Western water issues, more than 100 years later.
So where is all this water going? For all of the warnings people in the West get about taking shorter showers and turning off sprinklers,
the fact remains that agriculture uses the most water, by far. Farming and agriculture use more than 70 percent of the water that flows from the Colorado river to the seven river basin states.
In addition to those crops, cotton is one of the thirstiest crops a farmer can grow, especially in a desert.
many of the crops that use less water entitle farmers to fewer federal subsidies, and so farmers don't have much of an incentive to switch crops.
On top of subsidies,"Use it or Lose it"clauses in state water laws actually encourage farmers to flood their fields with much more water than they need
lest they lose the right to that amount of water in the future. Urban development is also a big factor.
For all its problems, Las vegas pioneered ways to save water and incentivize efficiency more than a decade ago that Los angeles is only beginning to adopt today.
What is California doing to address its water problems? Is it working? Californians do seem to be answering the call to use less water in their daily lives after Gov. Jerry brown imposed cutbacks in March.
The state's"water czar,"Felicia Marcus, continues to crack down on water waste, and creative ad campaigns are finding varying degrees of success. The state has cut deliveries of water to farmers through the state and federal aqueduct systems,
and is now beginning to tackle the tough tasks of reforming water rights and curtailing some of the state's most senior users.
The federal government is also sending millions of dollars in"drought aid""and local counties are exploring how to desalinate ocean water to replenish water supplies.
Some people are conscientiously conserving water in their homes in little waysy not washing their cars
or by capturing shower water from inside for their gardens outside, for instance. The drought has inspired also innovation in water conservation for restaurants, pools and lawns.
Meanwhile, others have been caught stealing water from their neighbors and drought-shaming campaigns have multiplied online. To the extent that climate change exacerbates the drought
The Los angeles Department of Water and Power is now also selling its stake in the Navajo Generating station to invest in clean energy alternatives,
though the plant (which generates more climate-warming gases than almost any other plant in the nation) will continue pumping Colorado river water to Arizona.
providing a substantial supply for both L a. and San diego. The All-American Canal moves water along the tail-end of the Colorado river near the Mexican border, nourishing one of the state's most valuable agriculture areas,
which entitle it to keep drawing water even as Lake Mead runs dry and the rest of the Colorado river states suffer through shortages.
But should Colorado river shortages worsen to the point that the states ever re-negotiate that division of water
so water shortages there affect food supply everywhere. Calculations by the Pacific Institute indicate that, by eating food grown in California,
each American indirectly uses more than 300 gallons of the state's water each week. Almonds, which require a comparatively huge amount of water to produce,
have become the most visible scapegoat for an enormous problem of which they are only one small part.
One almond takes almost an entire gallon of water to produceut so does a tiny slice of cantaloupe
In fact, some of the biggest"water hogs,"indirectly, are meat and Dairy cows and chickens and other animals eat a lot of crops,
which in turn require a lot of water. So it takes 86 gallons of water to make just 1. 75 ounces of beef.
Some research has suggested that the country's meat industries create such a high demand for water-thirsty feed crops, that if every American ate meat one less day a week,
it could save as much water as flows through the Colorado river in an entire year. Regardless
if the water crisis gets worse, Americans across the country can expect the cost of their food to go up,
and some of it, perhaps, to not be available at all. Power prices may also rise as hydroelectric plants have difficulty generating with low water flowsnd to the extent that very complicated power distribution affects a larger region,
For more on this story, read how federal dollars are financing the water crisis in the West,
how Las vegas'water chief preached conservation while backing growth and all about the power plant that's fueling America's drought.
or injecting water or other liquids into the plasma sheath to make it more permeable to radio signals,
sanitation and as rust-free metals Scientists at the University of Rochester have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water repellent,
And it is these patterns that make the metals repel water. he material is so strongly water-repellent,
the water actually gets bounced off. Then it lands on the surface again, gets bounced off again,
you need to tilt the surface to nearly a 70-degree angle before the water begins to slide off.
As the water bounces off the super-hydrophobic surfaces, it also collects dust particles and takes them along for the ride.
Roughly half of the dust particles were removed with just three drops of water. It took only a dozen drops to leave the surface spotless.
collecting rain water is vital and using super-hydrophobic materials could increase the efficiency without the need to use large funnels with high-pitched angles to prevent water from sticking to the surface,
says Guo. second application could be creating latrines that are cleaner and healthier to use.
Latrines are a challenge to keep clean in places with little water. By incorporating super-hydrophobic materials
a latrine could remain clean without the need for water flushing. But challenges still remain to be addressed before these applications can become a reality, Guo states.
The combination of light-absorbing properties with making metals water repellent could lead to more efficient solar absorbers solar absorbers that don rust
meaning they attract water. In fact, the materials were so hydrophilic that putting them in contact with a drop of water made water run phill.
Guo team is now planning on focusing on increasing the speed of patterning the surfaces with the laser,
as well as studying how to expand this technique to other materials such as semiconductors or dielectrics, opening up the possibility of water repellent electronics.
Perovskites are damaged easily by heat and readily dissolve in water. This inherent instability ruled out virtually all of the conventional techniques for applying electrodes onto the perovoskite solar cell
But if you expose perovskite to water or light it likely will degrade. We have a ways to go to show that perovskite solar cells are stable enough to last 25 years.
Wee been able to find out what in the water, the feed and the air, he said.
and purify water. But all these possible uses face the same big hurdle: the need for a scalable and cost-effective method for continuous manufacturing of graphene films.
For example, want to pick up that cup of water, 'Andersen says. o in this trial, we were successfully able to decode these actual intents,
say, pick up a glass of water to sip it, or feed themselves. They can even do anything if their nose itches.
#Who needs water to assemble DNA? Non-aqueous solvent supports DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY Scientists around the world are using the programmability of DNA to assemble complex nanometer scale structures.
Until now, however, production of these artificial structures has been limited to water-based environments, because DNA naturally functions inside the watery environment of living cells.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of technology have shown now that they can assemble DNA NANOSTRUCTURES in a solvent containing no water.
They also discovered that adding a small amount of water to their solvent increases the assembly rate
we have shown that DNA NANOSTRUCTURES can be assembled in a water-free solvent, and that we can mix water with the same solvent to speed up the assembly.
We can also take the structures that were assembled in this solvent mixed with water emove the water by applying vacuum
and have the DNA structures remain intact in the water-free solvent. The assembly rate of DNA NANOSTRUCTURES can be very slow,
and depends strongly on temperature. Raising the temperature increases this rate, but temperatures that are too high can cause the DNA structures to fall apart.
and adding water can adjust the solvent viscosity, which allows for faster assembly compared to the water-free version of the solvent. his solvent changes the rules,
said Isaac Gállego, a postdoctoral researcher in Hud lab and the paper first author. e now have a tool that controls DNA assembly kinetics and thermodynamics all in one solvent.
Glycholine is miscible in water, so it can be mixed in any ratio with water to control the kinetics of the assembly process.
For instance, one structure that assembles in six days in pure solvent will assemble in three hours in a glycholine solution containing 10 percent water.
A key feature of the new solvent system is that it does not require changes to existing DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY designs that were developed for water. ou can go back
and forth between hydrated and non-hydrated states, said Gállego. his solvent system preserves the DNA structures that have been developed to work in water.
The solvent system could improve the combined use of metallic nanoparticles and DNA based materials. In the typical aqueous solvents where DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY is performed,
The solvent low volatility could also allow storage of assembled DNA structures without the concern that a water-based medium would dry out.
In future work, they hope to use the control provided by water-free solvents to obtain dynamic DNA structural rearrangements that are not possible in water,
both at Georgia Tech. hat was surprising was finding a solvent that allows the assembly of structures more easily than in water.
because DNA NANOTECHNOLOGY was developed in water. The research on water-free solvents grew out of Georgia Tech research into the origins of life.
Hud and colleagues had wondered if the molecules necessary for life, such as the ancestor of DNA, could have developed in a water-free solution.
In some cases, he noted, the chemistry necessary to make the molecules of life would be much easier without water being present. his work was inspired by research into the origins of life with the basic question of
whether complex DNA structures could exist in non-aqueous solvents, and we showed that they can,
or attract water, controlling the motion and turbulence of fluids, and limiting the buildup of organisms on surfaces such as ship hulls.
another had components that were soluble in water. e complete the cycle from birth through life, activity,
because even simple dirty water has a lot of organic matter. Ability to generate small amounts of power from bacteria is very appealing for anyone working in remote areas.
Only 5 cents costing device that is so innovative that can produce power from dirty water would seem as science fiction some time ago,
because the materials can assemble in water instead of more toxic organic solutions that are used widely today. nce you make the materials,
you can dump them into water and they assemble into the appropriate structure because of the way the materials are designed,
with one end that was water-loving or hydrophilic and one that was water-fearing or hydrophobic.
A mixture of these molecules self-assembled into a vesicle, much like the coalescing of oil droplets in water,
with the hydrophobic ends pointing inward and the hydrophilic ends pointing outward. The result was millions of bubble-like structures, each 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
and transported a patch of the nanowire carpet on water droplets that were used used to deliver it to the site of injury.
After absorbing water, they and the tissue they comprise expand in such a way that entire plant parts move in a defined pattern.
which was able to simulate water flow in carbon nanotubes at very low speeds an activity that would normally require the equivalent of up to 40,000 years of processing power on a single computer.
simulations of water flow in carbon nanotubes could only be carried out under unrealistically high flow-rate conditions says the Director of CNMM, Quanshui Zheng. hanks to World Community Grid,
which will become essential to analyze the massive data generated by the volunteered computers. y simulating water molecules flowing through nanotubes we have shown how vibrations result in oscillating friction,
leading to enhancements in the rate of water diffusion of more than 300 percent. Ultimately this will help design new carbon nanotube based membranes for water filtration with reduced energy consumption. rowd-sourced computing power was essential to the success of our project.
Wakes occur whenever something is traveling through a medium faster than the waves it creates in the duck case water waves, in the plane case shock waves,
This work could represent a new testbed for wake physics across a variety of disciplines. his research addresses a particularly elegant and innovative problem in physics which connects different physical phenomena, from water wakes to sonic booms,
and others such as water or ethylene glycol that take in heat when they transform from a solid to a liquid.
and release a large amount of heat energy (230 kj L#1). This heat energy stored is large at approximately 70%of the latent heat energy of water at its melting point.
#NEC Conducts Water Leak Detection Trial for the City of Arlington, Texas NEC Corporation, NEC Corporation of America,
and the City of Arlington, Texas, today announced the successful conclusion of a water leak detection trial project for the city.
NEC delivers cutting-edge technology that offers municipal water utility companies a cost-effective way to manage water resources to help meet the water needs of the communities they serve.
and then can be used to identify the locations of water leaks. The project with the city of Arlington is the first of its kind conducted by NEC in the United states. During the course of this project,
Three water leaks were identified during the four months trial and have been repaired. This is the first step for the City to develop a long-term leak detection strategy by evaluating current leak detection technology. he City was pleased with the outcome of this project
says Darryl Westbrook, assistant director of Water Utilities, the City of Arlington. EC is committed to using innovative technology to help strengthen
we believe it will be particularly effective in supporting vaccination in developing countries. he new microneedle patch Microhyala is dissolvable in water.
the solvent would be water and the salt would be something like sodium chloride, for instance. However
which showed that by adding just a little bit of water into the batterieselectrolyte mixture, the researchers were able to make the lithium air batteries last four to five times longer. owever,
adding water is not a perfect solution, because it comes at the cost of being able to recharge the battery,
while water increased the battery capacity, it also catalyzed additional parasitic reactions, which prevented the batteries from being recharged.
the new Sentry Precision Robotic Impeller Driven (Syprid) sampler uses spinning blades inside tubes to gently pump large volumes of water,
for long periods of time while filtering enough volume to find the relatively rare organisms in the water.
much in the way a wave moves through water without actually transporting the water molecules anywhere.
One potential problem with black phosphorus nanosheets is that they degrade rapidly when in contact with water or oxygen.
#Synthetic coral could suck pollution out of the sea A team of Chinese researchers has developed a material that mimics the way corals suck industrial pollutants out of the water.
During testing, the coral-like plates removed 2. 5 times as much mercury from water than traditional aluminium oxide nanoparticles.
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