For people in developing nations or rural locations, getting clean water may soon be as simple as opening a book … and ripping a page out. That’s the idea behind The Drinkable Book, developed by Carnegie Mellon University postdoc Theresa Dankovich. Each of its pages is made from a thick sheet of paper impregnated with silver and copper nanoparticles, that kill 99.9 percent of microbes in tainted water that’s filtered through it.

A single book is claimed to meet one person’s water filtration needs for four years

Dankovich began work on the technology when she was earning her doctorate at McGill University, continuing it at the University of Virginia’s Center for Global Health. She has now formed a non-profit company, pAge Drinking Paper, to get the book into production and distribution. Read more

Parrot is already known for its drones that fly through the air and roll/jump along the ground, but until now the French company hasn’t had much to do with the water. That’ll change next month, however, when Parrot releases its Minidrone Hydrofoil.

The new product consists of two components – a main unpowered hydrofoil body, and a Parrot aerial Minidrone that can be attached to its deck via a hinged mount. When the Minidrone is fired up, instead of going straight up into the air as it would ordinarily, it pivots to sit perpendicular to the watercraft, turning it into a miniature fan boat. Read more

Skipping stones across water may seem like an innocent children’s pastime, but the science behind it has helped to win more than one war. Now, researchers at Utah State University’s (USU) College of Engineering are uncovering new insights into the physics of these kinds of water impacts that could have wide applications in the fields of naval, maritime, and ocean engineering.

It may seem strange, but knowing how to skip things off the water is a very important branch of physics. In the 18th century, Admiral Lord Nelson found that by skipping his cannonballs off the waves he could increase their range and impact. More famously, during the Second World War, Barnes Wallis used the principle to create his Bouncing Bomb, which was the secret weapon to destroy the vital dams in Nazi Germany’s Ruhr Valley during the Dambuster Raid in 1943. Read more

They might be fun to look at, but they’re not necessarily good news

Tide pools along the coast of central and northern California are filling up with inch-long, pink Hopkins’ rose nudibranch—a sea slug whose vivid coloring gives it a kind of punk rock appeal.

The Hopkins’ Rose nudibranch, or pink sea slug

Scientists are logging dozens of the creatures per square meter, says the University of California, Santa Cruz. The sea slugs, common to the waters of southern California, have not been seen in such numbers in the colder reaches of the state since 1998.

That was when the last big El Nino events contributed to “periods of warmer-than-usual ocean water and heavy rains,” explains Science Codex. But there’s been only weak El Niño effects recently, and only a 50-60 percent chance of related conditions occurring in 2015. So what’s causing the slew of slugs? Read more

Fluid is ratcheted through a gap between the pump’s teeth

In most pumps, either a spinning impeller pulls liquid in and then essentially “throws” it out via centrifugal force, or a rotor draws it through using peristaltic force. After studying how birds’ flapping wings use fluid dynamics to push air back while moving the animals forward, however, two scientists from New York University have developed a pump that works in yet another fashion – and it has teeth.

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