Called Water Ahead, the capsule like water urn filters water to make it potable. Its most unique feature is that it can be carried over to flood waters, is transport friendly. And it helps locate flood victims with integrated thermal graphic cameras, while acoustic signals and flash lights indicates their presence to the affected as well as lifeguards. It has `intelligent’ skin that sucks up muddy flood water and turns it into fresh drinking water.

How do they function? Acoustic signals and flashing lights inform the habitants that a capsule arrives. The mudwater of the flood has been filtered by diffusion through the capsule’s skin into fresh drinking water. Using a camera, helpers on the boat take stock of the position and settle on who should have priority of quicker help. The gadget may well turn out to be a mass product in future, with potable drinking water becoming a rarity in the name of commodity.
Via: Folkwang Hochschule

There have been many concepts and projects in the past that worked on generating water from air, but most of them confined to catering to the domestic needs. For the first time ever, researchers at Fraunhofer Institute led by Siegfried Egner, head of the department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (IGB) in Stuttgart, in conjunction with Logos Innovationen have come up with an idea of setting up large water harvesting plants that would use renewable energy to extract water from humid air.

Working on the principle of low pressure, these plants use saline solution that absorbs water, known as hygroscopic brine. Drawn through a tower or chimney, this moisture-rich solution drains off into an underground tank where solar collectors installed in the roof heat it up. This steamed water is collected and run down a completely filled tube into another tank from where it can be consumed.

However, the project is still in its conceptual stage and would take time to surface. Considering the fact that so far there is no information about how much it would cost and other set up details, let’s hope it really works, as it would surely make a difference.

Via Fraunhofer

There are chemicals found in pharmaceutical products that are also used in other industrial and manufacturing purposes. Lithium is used for the treatment of bipolar disorder, as well as for making ceramics. Nitroglycerin is a medication for the heart, as well as an ingredient in bomb-making. Copper is in contraceptives, as well as wires and pipes. The two most used industrial chemicals in the manufacture of medicinal drugs are the toxic elements of antiseptics phenol and hydrogen peroxide. They have also found their way loosely into practically anywhere in the environment.

According to an investigation by the Associated Press, US drug manufacturers ‘have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked.’ These drug manufacturers, some of them major companies, have always denied their environmental water pollution.

The AP investigation entitled ‘PharmaWater’ has identified trace concentrations of 22 compounds that exist in everyday drinking water in the US. These chemicals that are constantly released into rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water have found their way into the supposedly potable water that comes out of household taps.

The federal government has now opened some new investigation and testing, whereas it used to concur with drug companies that the chemicals released into the environment were within legal limits.

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Via Yahoo! News

Water scarcity, pollution, and sanitation were the main talking points in the Ministerial-level talks among more than 100 ministers from 190 participating countries meeting at the recent World Water Forum in Istanbul. The main premise is that water has become one of the world’s worsening problems. The content of heated debates is whether water should still be considered a fundamental ‘right’ or is it just a fundamental ‘need.’ It baffles why there is even a need for such a debate.

There were some immediate and serious considerations that involved intensive discussions such as agriculture that is a water-intensive activity but is not solving the problem of world hunger, the concentration of populations in coastal areas and the need for a comprehensive study and planning of water use in these areas, and the  vulnerability of population groups such as women and children especially in developing countries, as well as the provision of non-conventional resources such as desalination and reuse.

In the end, the Istanbul Declaration will take a formal position that water is still a fundamental human right, because most participating countries adopt the belief. More concretely, this right is translated to safe access to drinking water and sanitation, as well as water security. In the meantime, the world’s raging water problems need to be tackled posthaste, among them are the unprecedented and fast  impacting of climate change on the water situation, population growth, migration, urbanization, desertification, drought, and land degradation.

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Via Yahoo! Green

The global pharmaceutical market is worth 300 billion euros.  The United States is by far the leading consumer of medicines (51% of total), followed by Europe (25%) and Japan (15%). Residues of these prescription and over-the-counter drugs find their way into waterways all over the world. Although, drug pollution is primarily a problem of rich countries.

Bodies of water are loaded with traces of antibiotics, anticancer drugs, analgesics, antidepressants, anti-inflammatory agents, hormones, or beta-blockers. Waterways and underground water have become a drug cocktail, as molecules are diluted but never disappear. So, they end up in drinking water from out of the tap. What are the risks to human health? Concentrations can reach several hundred micrograms (millionths of a gram) per liter in the effluent and urban wastewater, and a few nanograms (billionths of a gram) per liter in surface water, groundwater, and water for consumption.

During a five-month investigation, the Associated Press learned that “tens of millions of Americans drink water that has tested positive for minute concentrations of pharmaceuticals, and they don’t even realize it.” In Philadelphia’s drinking water, for instance, 56 human and veterinary pharmaceuticals or their byproducts were traced. These included the active ingredients in medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness, and heart problems.

Canadian researchers from the University of Montreal have come to identify that the St. Lawrence River contains low concentrations of molecules found in drugs used against cholesterol, hypertension, and cancer. Many studies in the USA, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Finland and France, describe similar situations. The contraceptive pill has been found to have devastating effects on the environment because of hormones in it that are released into the environment via the urine of its users.

According to the National Academy of Pharmacy in a French report in autumn 2008, “The presence of traces of drugs or their derivatives has been widely established on a global scale, particularly in surface water, groundwater, and in the sewage sludge in sewage treatment plants used for agricultural spraying and soil.” All waters are contaminated, including those intended for human consumption.

Hospitals are a significant source, as well. Their effluents contain large quantities of both drugs and molecules of diagnostic and laboratory reagents.

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Via alive

That sounds pretty disgusting when you think about it, even though we are saying that the urine will be recycled! Irrespective of your personal tastes and fancy for delicacies, if you want to be a part of the crew that constantly keeps the International Space Station in shape and gets a fabulous view of the Earth and the vast cosmos, then you will have to get used to slight taste of Iodine in your water. But when you ask the people who have tasted the water from recycled urine on ISS, they will tell you that it tastes just fine.

Until now, space shuttle programs that constantly visit the space center have been carrying water with them, but that luxury will cease from 2010 and astronauts will have to recycle their own urine and drink it the next day. The system though produces pure water and is not at all as disgusting as it sounds. The technique of purification has been successful on earth and now will have to be fully tested in zero gravity for final approval.

The new technique of recycling allows the space station to be largely self sufficient and with the way fresh water resources are dwindling across the globe, the same process might hit our homes in a couple of generations’ time. Look, if you are putting me in space, keeping me there for several months on your own money and giving me that awesome trip of ‘once in a lifetime’, then I have absolutely no problem drinking from recycled urine. Sign me up NASA!

Via: cnet