Category Archives: Water

Water everywhere. But, not a drop to drink.

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It’s been an interesting year.  We had folks in Charleston, West Virginia banned from using water for several days. (I wrote about this as a terrorist act, because a company managed to have its toxic chemicals leak into the drinking water source.  (You would think this would make folks in West Virginia demand their government do a better job of regulating chemical storage.  But, they haven’t.  Proof that it takes all kinds.)  Or, folks in the Carolinas and even Virginia have Duke Energy pollute their waters with toxic sludge.  By pumping the coal ash into the Dan River.  (Again, no citizen outcry.)

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Water, water everywhere, but not a drop…

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I wrote about a ‘simple’ device that provides pure water for villages of a thousand or so in developing nations. But, now, instead of converting humidity in the air for water uses on land, solar technology has been adapted- and expanded- to make it relevant and critical to America… for our farms.

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Bug Power

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Now, this is thinking outside the box.   Dr. Adam Driks (Loyola, Illinois) is a microbiologist who has been studying spores for a while.  A spore is a protective shell (actually, concentric shells) that some microbes form to keep themselves  preserved during periods of environmental stress.  It was originally thought to be like a walnut shell protecting the valuable components within.  But, Driks has been studying Bacillus spores and found that when the relative humidity changes, so does the spore itself.

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Will this Pop pop?

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I admit it. I used to be a Coke junkie. Oh, that’s not true. I was a Diet Coke junkie. 24 bottles minimum- until they came out with 2 liter bottles , and then it was 3, 4, or 5 of them each and every day of the year. (Th is routine was supplemented by 6 cans of Diet Cherry Chocolate pop- for my dinner dessert.)

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Water, Water, NOWHERE!

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You know how I hate folks who tell me what they think is important and then do the opposite. (You know- Congress saying the issue is Jobs, Jobs, Jobs- and then vote on Obamacare more than 40 times; clients saying their bottom line is important- but don’t have any key performance indicators that can let them know if they are even making a profit…) Or, the World Economic Forum (Davos, Switzerland, 2013) declaring that water risk is one of the four most important issues affecting businesses for this century.

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A Microbial Battery For Waste Treatment?

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I’ve written beforeabout methods and processes to treat wastewater  (here and here, for starters- you can find more by searching the index to the right for wastewater)- including methods that may be able to provide power to attenuate the costs of such treatment. Now, another concept to employ microbes to generate electricity has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (right now, it’s ahead of print) describing work being done by Dr. Craig Criddle’s group at Stanford.

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