What’s hard and scaly and dwells in your pipes? Find out in this article, where I show you why plastic beads aren’t just for Mardi Gras.
Category Archives: Water Issues
Putting the green in nanomachines
We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink
How can we live on a planet overflowing with 326 million trillion gallons of water and still face shortages? Even if only about .05 percent of it is drinkable, shouldn’t there be some way to purify the rest? Actually, people all over the world convert seawater to potable water, but the process tends to be prohibitively expensive at large scales. Even so, with looming droughts, natural disasters and the large-scale redistribution of moisture threatened by climate change, the need for a solution grows more essential every day.
Phoenix and Portland plan for potable problems
Phoenix, Ariz., is a sprawling desert city with twice the population of Portland, Ore., and one-fifth its annual rainfall. The Valley of the Sun irrigates its golf courses with water channeled from the Salt, Verde and Colorado Rivers, while the City of Roses guzzles winter rains and stores the remainder in the reservoirs of the Bull Run Watershed.
What could these two cities possibly have in common? Simple. They both face seasonal water shortages if projections of population growth and climate change hold true.