Tag: water
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Simple Solar Water System Devised to Kill Pathogens
Engineering and food science faculty at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana designed a solar device to kill waterborne bacteria that the inventors say can help provide clean drinking water to millions of people in developing countries. Civil and environmental engineering professor Ernest “Chip” Blatchley and food science biologist Bruce Applegate, with the help of students,…
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Protocols Linking Underwater Devices to Internet Proposed
Engineers from University at Buffalo in New York are proposing a common set of wireless protocols for connecting underwater sensors, like those detecting tsunamis, to the land-based Internet. Electrical engineering professor Tommaso Melodia and graduate student Yifan Sun will present their proposal next month at ACM’s International Conference on Underwater Networks & Systems in Taiwan.…
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Safer, Cheaper Ultraviolet PCB Disposal Process Developed
A team of engineers and chemists at University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada devised a new process for cleaning soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, cancer-causing chemicals banned in the U.S. since 1979, but with residues still in the environment. The new methods, say Calgary engineering professor Gopal Achari and chemistry professor Cooper Langford,…
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National Lab Develops Solar Photosynthesis Testing Device
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California developed a device to test on a small scale electrochemical solar-energy conversion methods for future fuel cell and artificial photosynthesis technologies. The team led by Joel Ager and Rachel Segalman from the Berkeley Lab’s materials science division and Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis published its findings in…
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Solar Nanoscale Protein Filter Cleans Antibiotics from Water
Engineers at University of Cincinnati in Ohio developed a nanoscale filter powered by sunlight that can clean biochemical compounds, such as antibiotics, from lakes and rivers. Environmental engineering professor David Wendell and Ph.D. candidate Vikram Kapoor published their findings online last week in the journal Nano Letters (paid subscription required). The presence of antibiotics from…
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Non-Battery Power Supply for Aircraft Sensors Flight Tested
Engineers from Vienna University of Technology in Austria and the commercial aircraft manufacturer EADS are collaborating on a new type of power supply for sensors to monitor a fuselage’s structural integrity. The team reports the first successful flight tests of the devices on an Airbus aircraft. These energy harvesting modules, as they’re called, are the…
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Synthetic Tissue Created with Water, Lipids, 3-D Printing
Biochemical researchers at University of Oxford in the U.K. developed materials from networks of water droplets inside lipid films to perform functions similar to human tissue. The team led by Oxford chemistry professor Hagan Bayley published its findings as the cover story in this week’s issue of the journal Science (paid subscription required). The researchers…
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Enzyme Cocktail Generates High Volume Hydrogen from Biomass
Bioengineers at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, with colleagues from elsewhere in the U.S. and Mexico, developed a process to inexpensively extract large volumes of hydrogen fuel from any type of plant matter. The team led by biological systems engineering professor Y.H. Percival Zhang, published its findings online in a recent issue of the journal Angewandte…
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Bacterial Biofilms Found to Quickly Clog Medical Devices
Molecular biologists and engineers at Princeton University in New Jersey discovered that bacterial formations called biofilms can quickly tangle and trap other bacteria, disabling medical devices. The study by postdoctoral researcher Knut Drescher and colleagues appears online in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (paid subscription required). Drescher, working in…
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USDA Funding Research on Sustainable Organic Rice Farming
Texas AgriLife Research, a division of Texas A&M University in College Station, is conducting research on sustainable techniques to improve yields of high-quality organic rice. The work led by Fugen Dou, a soil and crop science professor at AgriLife’s lab in Beaumont, is funded by two U.S. Department of Agriculture grants totaling $952,000 that run…