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#Post#: 991--------------------------------------------------
Bring the lab to the water . . .
By: Surly1 Date: April 29, 2014, 11:44 am
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Water test for the world-
HTML http://ow.ly/wie7O
Simple pill brings lab to water to test for contamination
HTML http://images.sciencedaily.com/2014/04/140428120701-large.jpg
"We got the inspiration from the supermarket," says Carlos
Filipe, a professor of chemical engineering who worked on the
project.
Inspiration can come in many forms, but this one truly was a
breath of fresh air.
A group of McMaster researchers has solved the problem of
cumbersome, expensive and painfully slow water-testing by
turning the process upside-down.
Instead of shipping water to the lab, they have created a way to
take the lab to the water, putting potentially life-saving
technology into the hands of everyday people. The team has
reduced the sophisticated chemistry required for testing water
safety to a simple pill, by adapting technology found in a
dissolving breath strip. Want to know if a well is contaminated?
Drop a pill in a vial of water and shake vigorously. If the
color changes, there's the answer.
The development has the potential to dramatically boost access
to quick and affordable testing around the world.
"We got the inspiration from the supermarket," says Carlos
Filipe, a professor of chemical engineering who worked on the
project.
The idea occurred to team member Sana Jahanshahi-Anbuhi, a PhD
student in Chemical Engineering who came across the breath
strips while shopping and realized the same material used in the
dissolving strips could have broader applications.
The technology is expected to have significant public health
applications for testing water in remote areas and developing
countries that lack testing infrastructure, for example. The
researchers have now created a way to store precisely measured
amounts of enzymes and other active agents in pills made from
the same naturally occurring substance used in breath strips,
putting lab-quality science within instant and easy reach of
people who need quick answers to questions such as whether their
water is safe.
"This is regular chemistry that we know works but is now in pill
form," says John Brennan, director of McMaster's Biointerfaces
Institute, where the work took place. "The user can be anybody
in a village somewhere who can take a pill out of a bottle and
drop it in water." The material, called pullulan, forms a solid
when dry, and protects sensitive agents from oxygen and
temperature changes that can render them useless within hours.
Until now, such agents have had to be stored at extremely cold
temperatures and shipped in vials packed in huge chunks of dry
ice, at great cost and inconvenience. Using them has been
awkward, bulky and often wasteful.
The new method, described in an article published online in the
European chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, also holds promise
for other applications, such as packaging that could change
colour if food is spoiled.
"Can you modify packaging so it has a sensor to tell you if your
chicken has gone off?" Brennan asks. "The reason that doesn't
exist today is because there's no way you can keep these agents
stable enough."
The new method allows the same materials to be stored virtually
anywhere for months inside tiny pills that dissolve readily in
liquid. The pills are inexpensive to produce and anyone can add
them to well water, for an instant reading of pesticides, e.
coli or metals, for example.
The new technology can easily be scaled up and find its way to
market quickly, says Brennan. Pullulan is already approved for
wide commercial use and is mass produced, which can speed the
journey to market.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by McMaster
University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and
length.
Journal Reference:
Sana Jahanshahi-Anbuhi, Kevin Pennings, Vincent Leung, Meng
Liu, Carmen Carrasquilla, Balamurali Kannan, Yingfu Li, Robert
Pelton, John D. Brennan, Carlos D. M. Filipe. Pullulan
Encapsulation of Labile Biomolecules to Give Stable Bioassay
Tablets. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2014; DOI:
10.1002/anie.201403222
#Post#: 996--------------------------------------------------
Re: Bring the lab to the water . . .
By: AGelbert Date: April 29, 2014, 11:03 pm
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Surly,
EXCELLENT! Most non adult humans on this planet get sick, miss
school days, lose productivity and even die from bad water. A
huge number of adults suffer from dysentery as well, affecting
their longevity, productivity and quality of life. Clean water
is a BIG DEAL!
HTML http://dl2.glitter-graphics.net/pub/780/780562lvhmtn5nuw.gif
Of course there will be those heartless bastards that will warn
that may produce an increase in population and we "just can't
have that, can we"? Give em' hell when they bring it up! ;D
#Post#: 998--------------------------------------------------
Re: Bring the lab to the water . . .
By: Surly1 Date: April 30, 2014, 3:22 am
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[quote author=AGelbert link=topic=127.msg996#msg996
date=1398830597]
Surly,
EXCELLENT! Most non adult humans on this planet get sick, miss
school days, lose productivity and even die from bad water. A
huge number of adults suffer from dysentery as well, affecting
their longevity, productivity and quality of life. Clean water
is a BIG DEAL!
HTML http://dl2.glitter-graphics.net/pub/780/780562lvhmtn5nuw.gif
Of course there will be those heartless bastards that will warn
that may produce an increase in population and we "just can't
have that, can we"? Give em' hell when they bring it up! ;D
[/quote]
And there are alway people, like the head of Nestle, who
maintain that no one has a "right" to clean watery. this is what
you get when you financialize EVERYTHING, and the only values
that rule are those of Mammon.
#Post#: 6863--------------------------------------------------
Re: Bring the lab to the water . . .
By: AGelbert Date: April 12, 2017, 12:14 pm
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[center]LifeStraw Go with 2-Stage Filtration[/center]
[center]
HTML https://youtu.be/GDAnoxKlpdY[/center]
#Post#: 6868--------------------------------------------------
Re: Bring the lab to the water . . .
By: AGelbert Date: April 13, 2017, 6:52 pm
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[quote author=RE link=topic=9389.msg129285#msg129285
date=1492121181]
HTML https://www.forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2017/04/13/this-device-can-pull-three-liters-of-water-out-of-thin-air/#7c253b6f5611
HTML https://www.forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2017/04/13/this-device-can-pull-three-liters-of-water-out-of-thin-air/#7c253b6f5611
Apr 13, 2017 @ 04:36 PM
This Device Can Pull Three Liters Of Water Out Of Thin Air
Sam Lemonick ,
There are 13,000 trillion liters of water in Earth’s
atmosphere, but that doesn’t mean much for places like the
Sahara desert. A new device aims to help harvest some of that
fresh water from the air using only the Sun's energy.
[center][img
width=640]
HTML https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/619924220/960x0.jpg?fit=scale[/img][/center]
If it can be scaled up and commercialized, the technology could
be a boon to people living in arid regions or places where there
is extreme drought. Other water-harvesting devices require high
humidity, like fog, or need electricity to power condensers.
This one will work off the grid and and in very dry conditions,
according to its creators.
The new device has three parts: a highly porous layer to capture
water from ambient air, a solar collector to heat that layer and
release the water, and a condenser to turn that vapor into
liquid water. Lead researchers Omar Yaghi at the University of
California, Berkeley, and Evelyn Wang, at MIT, report in Science
that the harvester can draw almost 3 liters of water per
kilogram of adsorbent. And that’s at just 20 percent
relative humidity, low enough to make your eyes feel like
they’re drying out.
The key is the adsorbent, made from a spongy material called a
metal-organic framework. MOFs are pretty much what they sound
like, a metal atom or atoms with organic (i.e., carbon-based
molecules) attached, creating an open structure with a repeating
pattern. Yaghi is the king of MOFs, having designed thousands of
them since the 1990s. They’re particularly useful because
they can be designed to have specific physical and chemical
properties depending on what you want them to adsorb. MOFs have
been made to trap and store natural gas, capture methane from
car exhaust or scrub carbon dioxide from smokestacks.
This MOF is made to adsorb water and easily let it go. It has
clusters of zirconium atoms in a cage of carbon and oxygen,
connected by short fumaric acid molecules. Fumaric acid, by the
way, is sometimes used to give salt and vinegar chips their
vinegar flavor. That architecture leaves big pockets for water
molecules to gather in. And Yaghi says the chemical properties
of this MOF encourage water molecules to pack in more tightly,
increasing the amount of water it can adsorb from air.
Yaghi says his group first discovered this MOF while working on
a different project with Yang, to utilize MOFs for car air
conditioners. That program had ended when he realized this MOF
would release its water without much energy input—little
enough that the Sun could do it.
“We made this specific discovery, and I rushed to MIT and
said to Evelyn, ‘We have to get this out,’” Yaghi
recalls.
[/quote]
[center]
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width=200]
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