New 'Swiss Army knife' cleans up water pollution

First used to soak up oil in water, new sponge sequesters excess phosphate from water

02-Jun-2021 - Phosphate pollution in rivers, lakes and other waterways has reached dangerous levels, causing algae blooms that starve fish and aquatic plants of oxygen. Meanwhile, farmers worldwide are coming to terms with a dwindling reserve of phosphate fertilizers that feed half the world's food ...

Smart sponge could clean up oil spills

Highly porous sponge selectively soaks up oil, sparing water and wildlife

02-Jun-2020 - A Northwestern University-led team has developed a highly porous smart sponge that selectively soaks up oil in water. With an ability to absorb more than 30 times its weight in oil, the sponge could be used to inexpensively and efficiently clean up oil spills without harming marine life. After ...

Simulations Suggest Graphene Can Stretch to Be a Tunable Ion Filter

28-Nov-2018 - Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have conducted simulations suggesting that graphene, in addition to its many other useful features, can be modified with special pores to act as a tunable filter or strainer for ions (charged atoms) in a liquid. The concept, ...

System selectively sequesters toxins from water

09-Aug-2018 - Rice University scientists are developing technology to remove contaminants from water - but only as many as necessary. The Rice lab of engineer Qilin Li is building a treatment system that can be tuned to selectively pull toxins from drinking water and wastewater from factories, sewage systems ...

Mat baits, hooks and destroys pollutants in water

23-Mar-2018 - A polymer mat developed at Rice University has the ability to fish biologically harmful contaminants from water through a strategy known as "bait, hook and destroy." Tests with wastewater showed the mat can efficiently remove targeted pollutants, in this case a pair of biologically harmful ...

Targeting PFOA threat to drinking water

12-Jun-2017 - A highly toxic water pollutant, known as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), last year caused a number of U.S. communities to close their drinking water supplies. Because of its historical use in Teflon production and other industrial processes as well as its environmental persistence, PFOA ...

Zap! Graphene is bad news for bacteria

24-May-2017 - Scientists at Rice University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have discovered that laser-induced graphene (LIG) is a highly effective anti-fouling material and, when electrified, bacteria zapper. LIG is a spongy version of graphene, the single-atom layer of carbon atoms. The Rice lab ...

Treated carbon pulls radioactive elements from water

20-Jan-2017 - Researchers at Rice University and Kazan Federal University in Russia have found a way to extract radioactivity from water and said their discovery could help purify the hundreds of millions of gallons of contaminated water stored after the Fukushima nuclear plant accident. They reported that ...

High-tech materials purify water with sunlight

18-Mar-2014 - Sunlight plus a common titanium pigment might be the secret recipe for ridding pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other potentially harmful pollutants from drinking water. Scientists combined several high-tech components to make an easy-to-use water purifier that could work with the world's most ...

Cilantro, that favorite salsa ingredient, purifies drinking water

13-Sep-2013 - Hints that a favorite ingredient in Mexican, Southeast Asian and other spicy cuisine may be an inexpensive new way of purifying drinking water are on the menu at the 246th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. Reporting on research ...