New solar-power desalination device leaves no brine - Boing Boing

University of Rochester researchers have built a solar-powered desalination device that doesn't leave behind brine — the concentrated saltwater that conventional plants dump back into the ocean, where it raises salinity and starves sea life of oxygen. The panels are black metal etched with femtosecond lasers, so the surface both absorbs nearly all sunlight and wicks a thin film of water across it, distilling fresh water and shunting the leftover salts to untreated edges instead of letting them clog the works. To move the salt, the team borrowed a kitchen annoyance. "If you drop coffee on a surface, eventually the water evaporates, and there's a ring left at the outer edge that is the concentrated coffee particles," said optics professor Chunlei Guo. "We use that same principle to advance the salts to the passive region." When tested on Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean waters, the surface remains self-cleaning and recovers nearly all the salt as solids. A related version, using the same panels seeded with hydrogen titanate nanoparticles, removed about half the lithium from Great Salt Lake samples. Parents and caregivers have long reported that when some autistic people run a fever from an infection, their autism-related symptoms ease for a while. MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers,… READ THE REST Yeast survived for millenia inside a mummy, and can still be used to make bread. About 5300 years ago, a Tyrolean man died after being shot in the shoulder with… READ THE REST It's surely no surprise that my favorite Sesame Street character is Aloysius Snuffleupagus, a.k.a. Mr. Snuffleupagus, a.k.a. Snuffy. I mean, it's not a secret that I'm a sucker for an… READ THE REST Disclosure: Boing Boing earns a commission on purchases made through links in this post.   TL;DR: ChatOn bundles GPT, Claude, Gemini, Sonar, image generation, web search, and more into one app for… READ THE REST Disclosure: Boing Boing earns a commission on purchases made through links in this post.   TL;DR: Learn in your free time with a Headway lifetime subscription, now $69.99 (reg. $299.95). Books are… READ THE REST Disclosure: Boing Boing earns a commission on purchases made through links in this post.   TL;DR: Save videos from Netflix, Disney Plus, YouTube, TikTok, and more to watch anytime you want… READ THE REST