Drought isn’t just threatening the livelihood and health of people living in California and America’s Southwest. According to the Global Drought Information System, water scarcity is forcing cities around Taiwan to implement water rationing. In Madagascar, drought-caused crop failure is now threatening 200,000 people, while conditions are sliding throughout Africa’s equatorial region and south. Dengue fever is up in Brazil because of meager precipitation. Meanwhile Australia bakes, with parts of New South Wales not seeing rain in the last three years.
Lack of fresh water is a big, global problem. Yet insult is added to injury by the fact that 98 percent of the water covering Earth is salty. It can’t feed crops. It can’t quench thirst. It can’t cool power plants. The only way to use ocean water is to put it through desalination, which strips out minerals to make it fit for consumption and industrial use. But that process requires an often prohibitive amount of energy.
So it’s too bad that the filter shown above isn’t yet ready to go to work. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab have demonstrated a much more energy efficient way to make potable water from the ocean. The trick is to make the filter out of the celebrated supermaterial graphene, which is a sheet of linked carbon atoms just one atom thick, with holes poked in it by oxygen ions whizzing through. Their work joins other projects advancing graphene as the heart of future energy-efficient production of safe water. Learn more below.
Remember the US Department of Energy that the Republicans want to shut down? When a Republican president is elected in 2 years, this may well happen.
tinfoilparachute 