According to data from the World Health Organization and UNICEF, over 780 million people – or about one in nine – lack access to safe, clean drinking water. Millions of people die each year from water-related illnesses, and most of these are in the developing world. Since fresh water sources around the world are steadily dwindling while salt water sources remain plentiful, turning that salt water into potable water could be one way to help the growing water crisis. The small device seen above is a potential life-saver for untold millions. It is a simple, low-cost desalination device – a “chip” that removes the salt from salt water, making it suitable for humans to drink.

Okeanos Technologies was formed to flesh out the idea of a small chip that would use a weak electrical charge to remove the salt from salt water, using a mere 3 volts of energy. Each chip desalinates millionths of a liter at a time, a process called microdesalination. The process uses a form of energy called an electrochemical field gradient, a very effective method but one that can’t be used at macro levels. This may not sound like much, but the technology is modular in nature, meaning that hundreds or thousands of the chips can be used in unison to create fresh water for a person, a neighborhood, or a city – provided there is a source of salt water nearby.

Each chip features a microchannel with two branches. An embedded electrode creates an “ion depletion zone” which neutralizes chloride ions, guiding fresh water down one branch and salt down the other. The novel approach to desalination is much less energy-intensive than standard methods and requires no post-treatment or membranes to operate. Other than the basic removal of sediment, no pre-treatment is necessary. Bacteria and viruses are removed by the chip as well, making the newly-desalinated water completely safe to drink. Okeanos hopes to eventually build a vending machine-type device that would operate as a standalone desalination plant to provide water for an entire village, no special tools or knowledge required.

The post Nano Desalination Chip: Clean, Affordable Drinking Water first appeared on Gajitz.

When three students invented a waste-free water bottle called Ooho, the internet bubbled with interest. The biological packaging is easy to make at home, and the tinkerers at Inhabitat decided to do it themselves. Luckily for everyone, they also shared the recipe for making the edible water spheres at home.

The recipe calls for ingredients that probably aren’t in every kitchen, but that can be easily found by any determined maker. Sodium alginate and calcium lactate are the most exotic things you’ll need, and they’re both readily available on the internet or in most vitamin stores.

Inhabitat’s how-to video gives some very simple instructions for making the cool little water bubbles. They would make for a fun science experiment or even a unique way to bring along some individual servings of water on a picnic.

The post How to Make Your Very Own Edible Water Bubbles at Home first appeared on Gajitz.

Since that expensive water filtration pitcher in your refrigerator is less than portable when you go camping, MIT researchers have given us a natural way to create safe, clean drinking water from the nasty stuff you’ll find in the river. According to a study from a group of MIT mechanical engineers, water filtration is as close as the nearest sap-producing tree.

Using a regular piece of sapwood, researchers constructed a rudimentary water filter by stripping the park from the branch and pouring lake water through it. That completely natural, totally simple water filter was able to remove more than 99% of E. coli bacteria. Unlike other water purification methods like chlorination or boiling, this one can be performed anywhere and with no special equipment, though the researchers did use a plastic tube to make the pouring and filtration easier. In a real-world setting, the filter would be a slice of wood that you could use for a few days and then discard.

The secret to the filtration method is sapwood’s porous xylem tissue. The pores trap E. coli and other bacteria in tiny membranes, producing up to four liters of clean drinking water per day – enough to keep one person properly hydrated. The study used coniferous trees, but the researchers hope to experiment with flowering trees as well to see if they can provide the same natural filtration benefits. The sapwood’s pores are too large to filter out salt, but the method could be life-saving in the developing world where drinking water is typically collected from contaminated lakes and rivers.

The post Drink Up: Tree Branches Can Be Effective Water Filters first appeared on Gajitz.

In developing countries, water quality is something that often hampers progress. Proximity to water altogether is a threat to quality and something that led American social venture company Wello to create a portable water transporting device.

In regions of India, the trek to water can be up to five miles long. Retrieving it is a task done mainly by women, and the distance can cause it to take up to 25% of their day. The inventors at Wello created the WaterWheel, a spherical container that rolls on attached handles. It can hold 50 liters, a five-fold improvement on the traditional head-carrying method.

Wello created the WaterWheel after first visiting people in villages in the region of Rajasthan in 2011. They won a $100,000 Grand Challenges Canada prize that allowed them to fully develop the idea, which is now being manufactured in Ahmedabad city in Gujarat.

The post New Wheel Helps Carry the Weight of Water Transporting first appeared on Gajitz.

Access to potable water is a problem in much of the world, but the impact is felt especially hard in the coastal deserts of Peru. There, annual rainfall is a mere half an inch, but atmospheric humidity is abundant – about 98 percent. Researchers at Peru’s University of Engineering and Technology believed that they could turn that humidity into life-preserving water.

Before this experiment, the people in the villages surrounding Lima got their drinking water from wells. The wells were dirty and polluted, and certainly didn’t provide water that anyone would want to drink. Then a billboard went up that would make life easier for everyone in the area.

The “billboard” is actually a sophisticated water collection and purification system. Five generators purify the water collected from the atmosphere and collect them in tanks. The tanks provide enough clean, drinkable water for hundreds of families. The brilliant idea works so well that it has the potential to change lives all around the world.

The post Desert Billboard Makes Clean Drinking Water From Thin Air first appeared on Gajitz.