Nanotechnology Can Help Provide Clean Water
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:
Here are some references that describe how nanotechnology can be applied to clean water:
November 24, 2009 at 9:58 pm Comments (0)