The priestly accounts of the creation have fallen into discredit. So mysticism has to take refuge in the atom. The atom is a safe place not because it is small, but because you have to do complicated measurements and use underground channels to find your way there. These underground channels are concealed from the eye of the people because the plain man has not been taught to read and write size language. — Lancelot Hogben in Mathematics, the Mirror of Civilization. 

It’s obvious that we have met and exceeded Mr. Lebow’s expectation. We are world record holders in virtually all categories of consumption. It is equally obvious that massive consumption translates to massive squandering of resources and massive pollution. Read more

Did You Know?

• Ocean water contains about 35,000 parts per million of salt. Fresh water contains less than 1,000 parts per million.
• The first scientific paper on desalting was published by Arab chemists in the eighth century.
• Desalination/distillation is one of mankind’s earliest forms of water treatment. In ancient times, many civilizations used this process on their ships to convert sea water into drinking water.
• Today, desalination plants are used to convert sea water to drinking water on ships and in many arid regions of the world, and to treat water in other areas that is fouled by natural and unnatural contaminants. Read more

The Australian Government National Water Commission funded a study to establish an approach to assess the quality of water treated using managed aquifer recharge. Researchers at Australia’s CSIRO Land and Water set out to determine if the en product would meet standard drinking water guidelines.

At the Parafield Aquifer Storage, Transfer and Recovery research project in South Australia, the team of scientists harvested storm water from an urban environment, treated it in a constructed wetland, stored it in an aquifer, and then recovered the treated water via a well. Read more

We know we need clean drinking water in order to live. But rivers and lakes – freshwater ecosystems – provide much more. They water our crops, give us fish to eat, light our homes and bring us joy.

Yet around the world we are crippling the ability of rivers and lakes to support people, plants and animals. Scientists predict that by 2025 more than two-thirds of the world’s population could face water shortages. Read more

In a report to be published soon in The European Physical Journal E, researchers from the National University of the South in Bahía Blanca, Argentina studied the condition for model cavity and tunnel structures resembling the binding sites of proteins to stay dry without losing their ability to react, a prerequisite for proteins to establish stable interactions with other proteins in water.

E.P. Schulz and colleagues used models of nanometric-scale hydrophobic cavities and tunnels to understand the influence of geometry on the ability of those structures to stay dry in solution.

The authors studied the filling tendency of cavities and tunnels carved in a system referred to as an alkane-like monolayer, chosen for its hydrophobic properties, to ensure that no factors other than geometrical constraints determine their ability to stay dry. Read more