Mind-Blowing Sci-Fi Tech Finally Ends World’s Water Crisis!

Imagine a small box that can collect drinking water from the air, even in the Mojave Desert. It’s just one of the mind-blowing new technologies aimed at solving the global water crisis, the scale of which demands science fiction-level innovation.

According to the United Nations, more than 2 billion people around the world lack access to clean water. Faced with natural water scarcity and droughts amplified by climate change, many people have limited access to water, while others suffer contaminated water supplies. Many face both problems.

Imaginative tools and techniques are emerging to generate and clean water. Scientists have created microbial brain computers to detect toxicity, removed lead from H2O with electricity, and built a powerless purification device that resists human error.

Ultimately, these technologies could protect health of people around the world, whether in cities with lead-contaminated pipes or in rural settings where shared wells can run dry.

One of the richest sources of water on the planet is hiding in plain sight: the air.

Less than 0.001 percent of the atmosphere’s moisture could supply each person on Earth with 50 liters of water, according to Omar M. Yaghi, PhD, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yaghi’s laboratory developed a new way to take advantage of this immense invisible resource.

They join molecules into structures that resemble scaffolds, with organic molecules as struts and metal atoms as junctions. These metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, have vast surface areas: two football fields long folded into a pea-sized pinch.

Yaghi’s plexiglass water harvester is filled with MOFs, which can extract water from even the driest desert air. The box heats up when exposed to sunlight, causing the MOFs to extract moisture from the air, which is then released as ready-to-drink water.

“There is no material in the world that absorbs water and releases it in this way, with very low humidity, except the MOF,” says Yaghi.

With just 200 grams of MOF, the solar-powered box can collect more than a gallon of water per day.

The electric version can repeat the collection and release cycle throughout the day.

Microscopic single-celled organisms may hold the key to a different problem: a simple test for water safety.

Microbes have evolved to recognize and protect themselves from toxins in water that humans cannot taste or see, including arsenic, E.coliand lead.

“They have something like a genetic molecular brain that helps them do this,” says Julius B. Lucks, PhD, professor and associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University.

Microbes have biosensing proteins, also called biosensors, that bind to toxins, a process that activates a certain gene, such as the one that pumps lead out of the body.

The researchers discovered that they could extract certain biosensors and rewire the DNA to produce a different gene: one that glows in the presence of the pollutant.

They then edited more biosensor proteins and redesigned them to react to specific levels of contamination.

The final product is a portable DNA computer: a row of test tubes containing freeze-dried proteins. The greater the contamination in a water sample, the greater the number of tubes that will glow.

“Only if certain conditions are met do the final DNA molecules assemble and produce a fluorescent color,” says Lucks. “It’s something magical.”

Chlorine is a powerful tool for killing disease-causing waterborne pathogens, but it can be difficult to use effectively. Common methods, such as bleach tablets and knob dispensing devices, leave enormous room for human error.

Researchers at the Tufts Environmental Institute wanted to make chlorine easy to use in shared community water sources in places that lack electricity.

Their elegant solution has just two components: a small box that attaches to the end of a water pipe and a tank filled with liquid chlorine.

“Many of the health benefits we found from having treated water require that the water be treated all the time,” says Julie E. Powers, principal investigator of the device while at Tufts and now a doctoral student in environmental engineering at UC . Berkeley.

Because the box has a narrower diameter than the pipe, it causes a pressure change as water flows through it. This change in pressure, known as the Venturi effect, draws chlorine from the tank into the water stream, so it is automatically treated without electricity.

The researchers installed the Venturi device at water kiosks in seven communities in Bangladesh and Kenya, where access to drinking water is often limited. After a 6-month trial, five communities chose to purchase it.

Shocked by the lead water crisis in Flint, Michigan, scientists and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology repurposed their desalination technology to remove heavy metals.

They had already discovered how to use electricity to separate impurities from water. That method, known as shock electrodialysis, can remove large amounts of sodium from seawater. But sodium is an essential ingredient in drinking water, where it is found in much smaller concentrations, and lead can be difficult to remove without removing everything else.

“Leadership is very complicated. If you try to filter it out using electricity, it may play with you and stick to the walls or surfaces of the system you are using,” says Mohammad A. Alkhadra, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Their technology is based on electrically charged porous materials, such as microscopic pieces of glass, that are trapped in a filter housing like the activated carbon in a Brita filter, and remove 95 percent of the lead.

These materials increase the electrical conductivity of water, setting sodium and metal ions in motion and leaving a purified area in their wake. Only the pure water from that area is introduced into a drinking water tank.

“Water was something that I grew up appreciating and recognizing its value,” says Alkhadra, who grew up in Saudi Arabia, a country plagued by water scarcity.

As increasing numbers of people face increasingly scarce and contaminated water supplies, it’s a mindset many may need to adopt.