A federally funded research effort to revolutionize water treatment has yielded an off-grid technology that uses energy from sunlight alone to turn salt water into fresh drinking water. The desalination system, which uses a combination of membrane distillation technology and light-harvesting nanophotonics, is the first major innovation from the Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), a multi-institutional engineering research center based at Rice University. NEWT’s “nanophotonics-enabled solar membrane distillation” technology, or NESMD, combines tried-and-true
Freshwater from salt water using only solar energy
More of Today's Solutions
The Great Bubble Barrier: bubble curtains are intercepting 86 percent of rive...
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Rivers are how plastic gets to the ocean. Stop it there, and you stop it for good. The ...
Read MoreThe ultimate guide to drying and storing fresh garden herbs for year-round ho...
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There's nothing quite like wandering around your garden with scissors in hand, ready to cut fresh herbs to ...
Read MoreNow this is how to make eco-friendly prefab homes without cookie cutter approach
Prefab houses aren’t exactly a thrilling proposition to architects, but with urbanization in full swing, there is a great need for nice, quickly-constructed prefab ...
Read MoreA wild tapir gave birth in Brazil for the first time in more than a century
The Atlantic Forest, which once covered more than a million square kilometers along the eastern coast of Brazil and Argentina, has been steadily sliced ...
Read More
