Water23

When I was a kid growing up in Boston, MA, my friends and I would often head down to the Charles River. On warm summer days we would wile away the hours skipping stones on the river, fashioning makeshift rafts, or trying to lure a carp onto a fishing line using bread as bait. We would  keep cool in the shade of the trees along the riverbank, as we talked about baseball and our favorite team the Red Sox.

One day, some of my friends, in “urban Huck Finn” fashion, decided to raft over to a nearby island. They successfully reached the island, but on the way back the flimsily constructed raft started to unravel and one of my friends ended up falling into the river.

In those days, the Charles River had a reputation for being polluted.  For years sewage, industrial wastewater and urban runoff had flowed unfettered into the river due to lax environmental regulations. By 1955, the river had become so polluted that Bernard DeVoto described it in Harpers magazine as “foul and noisome, polluted by offal and industrious wastes, scummy with oil, unlikely to be mistaken for water.” Some might even remember the classic hit record “Dirty Water” by the Standells in 1966 that celebrated Boston and the dubious water quality of the Charles River.

As I remember, my friend’s parents were none too happy when he arrived home, sopping wet with clothes stained with from the brown-tainted water. At the time, rowers or sailors who fell in the Charles were advised to rush to get a tetanus shot.

Well, the water quality of the Charles River has improved over the years, but I’m still not sure I would want to drink the water. However, new advances in nanotechnology are making this a possibility as this video shows.

So what’s all this buzz about nanotechnology — what is it and what can it do? The National Nanotechnology Coordination Office has produced a new brochure titled “Big Things from a Tiny World” that helps explain the excitement surrounding nanotechnology in terms that a non-scientist can grasp. The brochure introduces nanotechnology with the following passage:

It’s a relatively new are of science that has generated excitement worldwide. Working at the nanoscale, scientists today are creating new tools, products, and technologies to address some of the world’s biggest challenges, including:

• clean, secure, affordable energy
• stronger, lighter, more durable materials
• low-cost filters to provide clean drinking water
• medical devices and drugs to detect and treat diseases more effectively with fewer side effects
• lighting that uses a fraction of the energy
• sensors to detect and identify harmful chemical or biological agents
• techniques to clean up hazardous chemicals in the environment

Here are some resources to start to learn more about nanotechnology:

• How Nanotechnology Works
• Nanotechnology (Wikipedia)
• National Nanotechnology Initiative
• NanoKids

Here are some references that describe how nanotechnology can be applied to clean water:

• Nanotechnology for clean water
• Nanotechnology and water treatment
• Nanotechnology and the challenge of clean water

This past spring and summer were unusually wet in the New England region. Heavy rainfalls in June put a damper on the beginning of summer trips to the beach. In fact, many farmers in the area were worried that their crops would be ruined by too much rain.

While New England experienced torrents of rain, on the other side of the United States, California is in the midst of a three-year drought. This crisis is having severe impacts on the local economy and quality of life. Californians are being forced to curtail their water usage. Because of water shortages, California farmers have left over half a million acres of agricultural land unplanted.

In the San Joaquin Valley’s, known as the “nation’s breadbasket,” the drought is having devastating affects on the farms. This region produces over half the fruits, nuts and vegetables for the rest of the United States. This drought has made the U.S. more dependent on imported agricultural produce and these imports often has higher rates of contaminants, such as Salmonella.

The prolonged drought has intensified some of the water issues that have developed as California has grown and become the world’s eight largest economy. The following video provides a good overview of how California’s water crisis developed and some of the ramifications.

In the following video, California farmers speak about their endangered livlihoods.

For more information, see:

• California’s Water: A Crisis We Can’t Ignore
• California’s Drought

Dean Kamen is a prolific American inventor and entrepreneur.  He is perhaps best known for being the creater of the Segway, a two-wheeled self-balancing personal transporter system. Kamen has been tinkering with technology and inventing new products since his teenage years.  He loves technology and through a program he founded call FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) he is introducing many high school students to the idea that science and engineering are exciting.

Kamen is also tackling one of the big challenges facing mankind — how to provide adequate clean water for our expanding population. Today, over a billion people do not have access to clean water, so providing solutions are a pressing need. Kamen has been looking at developing portable systems, that will work under harsh conditions and are extremely energy efficient. To address this goal, Kamen and his team of engineers at DEKA have created a product that contains two components, a water purifier called Slingshot that requires minimal energy and a Stirling engine based power generator that is fueled by cow dung.  

How the Slingshot Water Purifier Works