Water scarcity affects every corner of the globe. Around 1.2 billion people — almost 20 percent of Earth’s population — lives with the constant worry of not having enough drinking water to survive, according to the United Nations.
However, almost three-quarters of this world we inhabit is covered in water, the vast majority of which is undrinkable salt water. And it’s this problem that a crack team of innovators in London is looking to solve.
Thanks to several technological improvements over the last century, life for farmers is much easier than it used to be. But managing water consumption and distribution on farms is still a fairly manual process. Farmers have traditionally hired farm hands to drive through acres of fields and manually check the health of their crops and wetness of the soil.
Y Combinator-backed Tule (pronounced too-lee) aims to simplify the process with a device that senses plant moisture from a large area of land. It works by measuring something called evapotranspiration, or the amount of moisture released by plants into the air. The sensors collect data from the evapotranspiration and then send it to the site’s servers.
"I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyor belt and drop into a large bin," Gates, the Microsoft cofounder and billionaire philanthropist, wrote in a blog post on Monday. "They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water."
Everyone loves a nice houseplant, but taking care of it often gets put on the back burner as more urgent things divert their owners’ attention. A day here and a day there without watering or trimming turns into a regular pattern of neglect — and pretty soon, the plant goes the way of all cellulose.
ven in drought-stricken California, San Diego stands out. It gets less rain than parched Los Angeles or Fresno. The region has less groundwater than many other parts of the state. And more than 80 percent of water for homes and businesses is imported from sources that are increasingly stressed. The Colorado River is so overtaxed that it rarely reaches the sea; water originating in the Sacramento River delta, more than 400 miles north, was rationed by state officials this year, cutting off some farmers in California’s Central Valley from their main source of irrigation. San Diego County, hot, dry, and increasingly populous, offers a preview of where much of the world is headed.
Si l'utilisation des microalgues pour la production de biocombustible est à la mode, on sait moins, en revanche que ces microalgues peuvent aussi être utilisées comme "gardiennes" de la qualité des eaux de surface, en détectant la présence d'herbicides agricoles en quantités anormales. Une équipe de chercheurs multidisciplinaire de l'Université Complutense de Madrid (UCM) a mis au point un dispositif original de détection in situ des taux d'herbicides agricoles en suspension dans les eaux fluviales, qui met à profit certaines propriétés des microalgues.
One company in the state’s water cluster—Newton, MA-based Desalitech—today announced an $11 million equity funding round led by Spring Creek Investment Management, a family investment office based in Philadelphia. The money will help Desalitech expand sales of its efficient water purification products, the company says.
Halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation is “the least on-track target” of the millennium development goals (MDGs), as 2.5 billion people still lack basic sanitation facilities.
Applying a novel coating to part of the machinery in power plants could significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Applying it at just one coal plant would reduce yearly emissions as much as taking 4,000 cars off the road would, says Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT who helped develop the new coating, which is being commercialized by a startup called DropWise.
L'Institut Fraunhofer pour la recherche sur le silicate (ISAC, Wurtzbourg - Bavière) et l'Université de Stuttgart ont développé conjointement un procédé visant à récupérer le phosphate contenu dans les eaux usées. Ce projet est le fruit d'une subvention pour la recherche de la Fondation du Bade-Wurtemberg ("Stiftung Baden-Württemberg") et a fait l'objet d'un dépôt de brevet par le cabinet de conseil en propriété intellectuelle TLB de Karlsruhe ("Technologie-Lizenz-Büro").
