Breakthrough: Previously unknown compound in chloraminated drinking water identified

Identifying the compound required a more complete understanding of chemistry and better analytical instrumentation

26-Nov-2024 - Since the 1980s, its been known that a mysterious contaminant forms in chloraminated drinking water, but only now has a Swiss-American research team been able to identify the unknown product in US drinking water systems. A team of researchers from the United States and Switzerland have reported ...

Clean water from fog

A property known as photocatalytic memory ensures that this also functions when skies are overcast and at night

25-Aug-2023 - Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and ETH Zurich are using a specially coated metal mesh to extract water from fog while removing environmental pollutants. People in dry but foggy areas could benefit. It's already being done in Peru, Bolivia and Chile, but also in ...

Sustainable clean drinking water solution

Olivier Gröninger is improving the drinking water supply for people in rural areas of South America with his Openversum project

03-Nov-2022 - 'There are still two billion people in the world without access to clean drinking water,' says Olivier Gröninger, a postdoc in Professor Wendelin Stark’s group at ETH Zurich. These are the people whom the chemical engineer wants to help. Over the past five years, he has developed an inexpensive ...

Filtering radioactive elements from water

Membrane massively reduces volumes of waste

01-Oct-2020 - The nuclear accident in Fukushima remains etched into people's memories. It was a catastrophe that caused huge amounts of radioactively contaminated water to be released, which the operators of the nuclear power plant subsequently had to clean up. One of the methods they used was reverse osmosis ...

Water that never freezes

12-Apr-2019 - Can water reach minus 263 degrees Celsius without turning into ice? Yes it can, say researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, if it is confined in nanometre-scale lipid channels. Making ice cubes is a simple process: you take a plastic ice-cube tray like you’d find in most ...

Three-way battles in the quantum world

13-Apr-2016 - In phase transitions, for instance between water and water vapour, the motional energy competes with the attractive energy between neighbouring molecules. Physicists at ETH Zurich have now studied quantum phase transitions in which distant particles also influence one another. When water in a pot ...

Highly efficient heavy metal ions filter

27-Jan-2016 - ETH researchers have developed a new water filtration system that is superior to existing systems in many respects: it is extremely efficient at removing various toxic heavy metal ions and radioactive substances from water and can even be used in gold recovery. In November, Brazil experienced an ...

Trampolining water droplets

06-Nov-2015 - Materials that actively repel water and ice very strongly are sought after by the aviation industry and for many other technical applications. ETH researchers have now found out how to specifically design the rigid surfaces of such materials: by teaching water droplets how to trampoline. If you ...

Glacial melting may release pollutants in the environment

26-Oct-2009 - Those pristine-looking Alpine glaciers now melting as global warming sets in may explain the mysterious increase in persistent organic pollutants in sediment from certain lakes since the 1990s, despite decreased use of those compounds in pesticides, electric equipment, paints and other products. ...

Molecules on a string, and why size isn't the only thing that matters for data storage

Physicists get a grip on slippery molecules, and learn how the shape of nanoscopic magnetic islands affect data storage

16-Sep-2009 - Molecules of hydrogen are difficult to steer with electric fields because of the symmetrical way that charges are distributed within them. But now researchers at ETH Zurich have found a clever technique to get a grip on the molecules. Their findings are reported in Physical Review Letters and ...