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"Lifesaver Bottle" Filters Viruses Out of Water
gihan_ripper writes "British inventor Michael Pritchard has developed a small self-contained filter system that instantly cleans water, removing all particles larger than 15nm. He said that he was inspired after seeing the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004; people had to wait for many days to get fresh water and many died from drinking contaminated water. The filter is so effective that it can purify dirty river water and even fecal matter. His bottle will shortly be available for sale from Lifesaver Systems at an expected cost of £190 (approx. $385)."
Until it can turn my pee into water, I don't see the usefulness.
Day 1
Mommy, I am only 8 inches long, but I have all my organs. I love the sound of your voice. Every time I hear it, I wave my arms and legs. The sound of your heart beat is my favorite lullaby.
Day 2
Mommy, today I learned how to suck my thumb. If you could see me, you could definitely tell that I am a baby. I'm not big enough to survive outside my home though. It is so nice and warm in here.
Day 3
You know what Mommy, I'm a girl!! I hope that makes you happy. I always want you to be happy. I don't like it when you cry. You sound so sad. It makes me sad too, and I cry with you even though you can't hear me.
Day 4
Mommy, my hair is starting to grow. It is very short and fine, but I will have a lot of it. I spend a lot of my time exercising. I can turn my head and curl my fingers and toes, and stretch my arms and legs. I am becoming quite good at it too.
Day 5
You went to the doctor today. Mommy, he lied to you. He said that I'm not a baby. I am a baby Mommy, your baby. I think and feel. Mommy, what's abortion?
Day 6
I can hear that doctor again. I don't like him. He seems cold and heartless. Something is intruding my home. The doctor called it a needle. Mommy what is it? It burns! Please make him stop! I can't get away from it! Mommy!! HELP me!! No . . .
Day 7
Mommy, I am okay. I am in Jesus's arms. he is holding me. He told me about abortion. Why didn't you want me Mommy?
One more heart that was stopped. Two more eyes that will never see. Two more hands that will never touch. Two more legs that will never run. One more mouth that will never speak.
REPOST THIS IF U HATE ABORTION
This sounds like what was in Dune... A rehydrator from excrement (sweat, fecal matter, urine).
If anything, along with rebreathers and this rehydrator, one could stay in horrendously inhospitable areas for a long while.
Fantastic idea, except for the fact that anyone in the path of Katrina who could have afforded a $385 water bottle could have afforded a $90 plane ticket, $35 bus ride, or $27 tank of gas.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
"The filter is so effective that it can purify dirty river water and even fecal matter."
No shit!
http://www.lifestraw.com/
Just what I have been waiting for. I want my still-suit now.
Day 5: ...
I think and feel. Mommy,
Totally physically impossible. Of course, the religious right is used to lying and manipulating, because they can't ever show proof (like where's this God dude, anyway?)
Kevin Smith on Prince
I mean, who wouldn't want to see if this prototype REALLY got the poop smell out of water?
But how do you clean the filter? Clean water?
385 bucks, huh? Sounds like he's hell-bent on saving a lot of lives.
I somehow have doubts that the poor people remaining in NOLA during and after Katrina would have been able to make use of these bottles, if they were available, at 385 freaking dollars!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Water purifier pills are way cheaper. Still, most people don't keep a box of them "just in case" in their backpack (right next to the dry rations, water-proof matches and raincoat).
Especially for those entering inhospitable terrain or likely to face the risk of severe dehydration, desert or jungle environments and so forth, as well as for emergency post-disaster use. As this is Slashdot I've obviously not read the article (yet) but what's the lifespan/filtration capacity of the bottle? Presumably it's able to be used many times, but is there some way of seeing, or being made aware, of when it's no longer effectively filtering the contaminants?
Seriously, can we get some new tags for moderation already?
TFA says both. Which is it?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Is there one for Windows?
I've read, probably in Technology Review, of people making this for 3rd world countries where bad drinking water is rampant. I think they've gotton costs minimal (@$15) and reliability high. .
Sounds great, but what are the odds that the average citizens in Ache or any of the other poor areas affected by the tsunami could afford the bottle.
On the other hand, it sounds great for places like in Tokyo where you'll need a water cleaning kit for the big one. People will still have plenty of access to water in the form of Tokyo Bay and the rivers, but nothing clean enough to normally drink. It would have to be better than the current stratergy of leaving filled bottles of water outside houses and in local parks.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
There are good (and cheap) ways of decontaminating water. Something as simple as "boiling". Some substances (like bleach and potassium permanganate) also do the trick.
This may be a good idea for someone that has to drink water from whatever. But not for Katrina type of stuff.
And even then, fish still fuck on it...
how long until
Ok, $385 a bottle for a person is a lot to swing, but $385M for the US Government to stockpile a million of these things is chump change. I guarantee shipping a little purifier bottle into a disaster zone would be a lot cheaper than trying to ship in millions of pounds of bottled water or other methods, so it would be cheaper for the gov't.
I think we need to have these, what if the terrorists take out the water. Really, as much as people see the war on terror as a total waste, if rich people are actually willing to fork over taxes and spend gov't bucks on total preparation, I think we'd all do well to invent things like this!
This is my sig.
More than one year ago, BBC mentioned the LifeStraw that filters water as you drink. It's able to filter 700 litres of water and was at that time priced at less than two quid (probably the wholesale price). See also the inventor Torben Vestergaard Frandsen's website.
Unselfish actions pay back better
Nevertheless, the idea is great and hopefully it can be sold for $10 in the future after a few refinements.
Full Tilt
Anyone who has ever been camping in the back country knows that there's been several products on the market like this for quite a while now... such as this http://www.campmor.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?productId=37101015&memberId=12500226 one.
If this can deliver 4,000 liters at under $1 a liter, and is shipped empty, it's cheaper than shipping pallets of bottled water for military and aid organizations. And when mass production hits, I can see this becoming popular with campers, tourists, business travellers and others.
Micron size water filters have been around for a long time, ask any outdoorsman or backpacker. They've always been rather expensive, though not usually as much as this one. Also, all those particles that are filtered out of your water are left behind in the filter, which rather quickly clogs up those micron sized pores, requiring the cartridges to be replaced. The throughput also isn't very great, unless you have a pump to force the water through filter.
How is this anything more then a press release for something that's not very new at all??
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
His bottle will shortly be available for sale from Lifesaver Systems at an expected cost of £190 (approx. $385).
Number of people who died from drinking contaminated water during Katrina, the tsunami and other disasters that can afford such a bottle?
0
It's been possible to buy similar "virus level" filters for hiking since at least the 80s. The typical problems are cleaning, and clogging. See Katadyn or your local REI for a variety of samples. Then there's the "$2" (really about $7) LifeStraw, that was advertised on gizmodo 2 years ago... is this just a running theme?
If the filter is small enough to block viruses, then it is so small that even very small 1u particles will clog it. The whole filter system has to be optimized... and they still clog. They claim 1000 liters, but I'm not really buying it. If it really has something to do with distilling, then I'd be more positive, but that's usually pretty darn complex.
Perhaps he's using a teflon reverse osmosis filter? At the price, it's certainly possible. Those take significant pressure, but they would take out viruses. The water has to start pretty clean too or they develop a film which clogs them too. People have tried iodine on them as well... it works for a while. Whithout knowing what this thing is (and the website's no help), I don't think we can really talk coherently about it.
If it is just a filter you can reverse flush and clean and do a variety of other things, but if your filter clogs after a few liters you'll be _very_ unhappy. This is made more difficult by the fact that you're trying to clean out biologicals, which will happily grow in the filter so it clogs up even quicker, and the cleaning is even more important and difficult to do completely. That's why people make throw aways or just add a halogen (chlorene/iodine) to a tub of relatively filtered water (so things can diffuse) and wait an hour.
Most hikers (who bother) use a more coarse filter (for bacteria only). Often these are treated with iodine as well, and perhaps charcoal to remove bad tastes. These keep clogging problems down, and make cleaning somewhat more easy. That's what the LifeStraw is based on.
I hope this is really an advancement, but it has the smell of an ad.
Does it remove Dihydrogen Monoxide from the water?
I'm curious about how this works. We've had filters that were capable of filtering out viruses for a long time, so it's not anything new. The problem is that they clog very quickly when you try to filter anything that has large amounts of solids in it (like feces). If it's some kind of multi-stage filter that uses increasingly smaller pore size filters at each stage, how often do you need to change the filter?
Someone could stock up on these at $385 each. Buy 1000 of them. Then go and sell them for, say $500 when the next major disaster hits.
People would get safe water that way.
But it would be price gouging, so it's illegal. Better people die from drinking polluted water than someone make a few dollars helping them. That's the rule of price-gouging laws.
"...homeopathic properties." lool!
-the worst part about this, is that lifestraw(a DANISH invention)
(g00gle it, if you don't believe me)
was invented to help people in third-world countries (hence the low cost),
as well as people in catastrophe-hit areas, and then a greedy swine comes along.
I seriously hope he chokes on it, the bastard.
(no; I wish for every being to have long, good lives, but this is just evil)
You live and you learn; some just choose not to...
During Hurricane Rita, there seemed to be 4 things that were important to get to the affected people: water, electricity, ice, and chainsaws (yes, chainsaws). If there were some simple, cheap source of electricity, (like the OLPC?) it would be fantastic.
Only on Vista. The DRM is brutal and if it finds an arbitrary problem, it flavours the water like Pepsi Blue.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
1st. Nice marketing gimmick, but the same technology can be used with common everyday objects like Sand and Gravity. (Add a little charcoal from you fire and your really High-Tech.)
2nd. Does anyone study history anymore, because: John Gibbs did this in 1804 when he built the means of water treatment and sold it to the public in Paisley Scotland.
3rd. try a do it yourself job at http://www.biosandfilter.org/ or get a more field expedient version at http://www.therangerdigest.com/Tips___Tricks/Filter_and_Purifying_Water/body_filter_and_purifying_water.htm
Can it be used to filter out and purify cheap vodka into expensive one?
I've read some guy experimented with brita filter just doing this.
There has been gear like this for years - outfitter stores provide these capabilities - including solar stills, reverse osmosis filtration and the tried and true Iodine tables for a lot less than $350!
/.'d so I can't verify his claims.
Sounds like someone is trying to make a buck at the expense of ignorant people. Of course, the site is
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Simple, portable, anti-viral filters are not new. The First Need Deluxe Water Filter/Purifier is $93 at Amazon. First Need is one filter that claims to meet EPA virus-removal standards by filtration alone -- a nice change from the yucky taste (and for some, the health risks) of iodine. Most antiviral filters involve an iodine element; when its job is done, a carbon element rids your water of any face-scrunching aftertaste. How To Buy a Water Filter
So there is a 15nm filter that can get even viruses and bacteria out of water?
How about using it for home use, recycling "Grey water waste" and rainwater into drinking water. £400 a pop seems more impressive when considered that way. Assuming the filters can be made economically enough there is a huge potential market there.
I like the idea of anything that reduces our dependence on piped convenience.
I can see the usefulness for survival-type purposes, but are we going to see some people from overprotective germ-scared parents to not-quite hypochondriacs start overusing some of these things, such that their immune systems fail to become hardened enough to disease? Isn't there a point where catching a freakin' cold or flu may actually be GOOD for you down the road?
Day 5 after conception I doubt that you can think or feel at that point, but you are certainly a human being at that point by definition because you now have the full 23 pairs of chromosomes in your DNA
I have distinct memories of being aware of myself and of other people "outside" while I was still in my mother's womb. I knew who my older sister was because she would lay next to my mother and sing to me. I knew who our family doctor was, because my mother had some medical complications and made many frequent trips to his office during the latter months of the pregnancy, and his voice was extraordinarily distinctive sounding, very deep with a thick southern drawl. I have vivid memories of my own birth. I was quite awake and conscious... and very terrified during the ordeal. Later as a child, I described everything I remembered to our doctor (this was in a small southern city in the late 1960s when there were no fancy big city hospital with teams of specialists, we had one and only one family doctor who took care of all our medical needs, and a very small and modestly equipped small town hospital) and the old doctor was flabberghasted that I recalled the details of what I remembered during my birth, the color of the delivery room, the unusual light fixture on the ceiling, seeing him for the first time, his two nurse assistants and the gowns they were wearing, and my crying uncontrollably until I couldn't catch my breath anymore when the nurse came at me with large scissors to cut the umbilical cord and then I stopped breathing and remember seeing the doctor and his nurses go into a panic just before I blacked out.
So yes, I am living proof that even before your birth, and at least several months before your actual delivery, you are very much self-aware, and understand the concept of other people even though you cannot yet see them, and you able to understand communication from them.
His bottle will shortly be available for sale from Lifesaver Systems at an expected cost of £190 (approx. one week's pay or half one month's rent for those that would have actually needed this during Katrina.)
From the lifesaver systems "unique features" page:
Finally. I hate when my teat gets all chewed up. It's also pretty creepy that my previous teat can taste me whenever I use it.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
HOWEVER, it can only filter particles down to 200nm, which is good enough to get just about all bacteria and some viruses. But, this new one filters down to 15nm which covers just about everything. Slap a charcoal filter on it to absorb toxins, and it sounds like a hell of a water system.
Still, you can have my Pocket filter when you pry it from my cold, dead, dysenteric fingers. ;)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
You need 2 buckets, a cotton t-shirt, propane camp stove ( or a heat source to boil water of some kind ) and bleach.
Cover the mouth of the empty bucket with the cotton t-shit.
Fill the other bucket with suspect water.
Pour the water from the full bucket into the empty bucket through the t-shirt. This filters out the larger baddies.
Presuming at least one of the buckets is metal, you can boil water in that. If not, a pot of some sort is required. The idea is to boil the water to a rolling boil for at least one minute.
Allow the water to cool for at least 30 minutes. Once cool, add 16 drops of bleach per gallon ( or 8 drops per 2 liter bottle ). If the water smells faintly of chlorine, it's safe to drink. If not, repeat adding the bleach.
Thanks to the Red Cross for directions.
A $400 water filtration system is nice, and can be cost effective in some cases ( as others pointed out, shipping and distributing small empty bottles is easier that shipping and distributing water ), but not having one doesn't mean you have no options.
A Human Right
Another method of killing bacteria in drinking water is to expose it to excessive ultraviolet light. You can do this by putting it in clear plastic bottles, then set the bottles on a mirror in the sun. A reflective tin roof will also work. After an hour or so, this method kills 98% of harmful bacteria. Bacteria has a tolerance of normal amounts of UV light, but the mirror doubles the exposure, which they are unable to survive.
I don't know if fecal matter in water would be cleaned by this method.
Water purification methods.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Yup, they were called stilsuits in the dune universe.
I looked at the Katadyn device and I always wonder why people slap on the Swiss flag. Is that supposed to mean Swiss use it? Heck I am sitting here in Switzerland and have hiked quite a bit through the mountains. Never seen the device. Want to know what people do? They drink the water fresh from the creek, or from one of the fountains that you find scattered throughout the mountains.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
During something like Katrina, there is a lot more crap in the water than just bacteria.
What does this thing do with gasoline, pesticides, and other chemicals coming out of drowned cars, stores, homes, and factories? If it isn't removing these chemicals, then you can't be sure the processed water is safe to drink. You will probably see a lot of sick people who relied on this product, and got poisoned because of the false sense oc security.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Now my tap water won't taste like it came from a poorly-maintained public swimming pool any more...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
It wasn't the hurricane that was the problem. It was the levies. Had the levees not broken, we would not be talking about Katrina today.
...and don't even get me started on the emergency response.
Obviously, they are related because the levees would not have broken without the hurricane. But the point here is that the Hurricane did remarkably little damage on it's own. The levees, on the other hand, were responsible for almost all of the issues you read about today.
Just another example of the edges starting to fray with respect to our national infrastructure. Without the levee issues, Katrina isn't special. Powerful? yes. Scary? yes. Destructive? Not really, when compared to something like Andrew or Hugo.
This would have been relatively useless in Katrina-ville. Although filtering out the bacteria and viruses will make the water a lot more drinkable, this device will do nothing to eliminate the salt (it was the gulf waters that flooded New Orleans, remember), or any of the toxic chemicals (ie gasoline, antifreeze, etc from submerged cars). Activated carbon will only go so far. According to the Wiki "Activated carbon does not bind well to certain chemicals, including alcohols, glycols, ammonia, strong acids and bases, metals and most inorganics, such as lithium, sodium, iron, lead, arsenic, fluorine, and boric acid.". I'd expect to see much of these things in post hurricane industrial floodwaters.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
At 15nm, would salt particles be filtered out from salt water? I'm not sure about the size of salt particles dissolved in water. If it is, then this water bottle has a lot more potential.
At that price he had better start making them disposable and then go public.
Drinking pee is harder than you think. I speak from personal experience.
I was lost in the Ozark mountains for 2 days without any supplies. The temperature was over 100F and I had almost no water. The little water I did have was exhausted quickly and the next best alternative was my own pee. I became thirsty enough that drinking my own pee was not even a question - it was a necessity (or so I thought).
I removed my flashlight batteries and peed in my flashlight because it was the only thing I had that could hold liquid.
Guess what happens to your pee when you are dehydrated? It's get much more concentrated. So much so, that I think you'll have a hard time drinking it unless you are, literally, getting close to death. Mine was so strong, I couldn't even stomach the smell much less, drink it. I have never been as thirsty in my life as that day and I have never since, been in a situation as dire as that one. Yet, I couldn't drink it.
While it may be an option early on, as dehydration starts setting in, drinking your own pee becomes less of an option as each hour passes by.
Damn folks still thinking that Katrina only affected New Orleans. Katrina
wiped out entire cities on the Mississippi Gulf coast. Infrastructure
was destroyed for at least 100 miles inland. The military had to **cut**
their way down HWY 49 to reach the coast.
So, to correct your statement, A large percentage of New Orleans problems
were caused, post hurricane, by the failure of the levees. A large percentage
of the problems caused by directly Katrina were actually in Mississippi.
As mentioned above, a $400 dollar (please include tax and shipping damn it) would have done little to ease the self made suffering in N'Orleans. The people who remained, the ones that couldn't leave the city in the hours/days prior to the event, would have been confused by these bottles, even if they were given out for free. They would have simply complained that, while they had this filtration system, the evil G-Dub sealed them in plastic to prevent their use. To further exasperate the problem, G-Dub maniacally had the plastic encased bottles torturously hidden inside of a box.
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
I mean right?.... Anyone... Okay I havent either. Thats gross.
Air force survival guidelines imply that urine can only be safely "recycled" 7 times. But since we sweat and spit and such, the amount of water goes down every time as well.
But Katrina and after the tsunami, these are not pee drinking situations. Last night, that was a pee drinking situation. Just kidding... maybe.
I imagine the parent was joking, but diarrhea caused by contaminated drinking water is one of the biggest killers of children in the world, and an effective cheap water purifier would save many, many lives.
I am a hiker, I use an MSR pump filter.
The MSR pump allows you to exert a fair bit of force and you will get tired pumping a single liter.
The MSR has a coarser (more open filter).
The MSR will start to clog withing tens of liters of what looks like fairly clean water. You then need to clean the filter.
The MSR is actually one of the better filters on the market.
Now how can a filter that is supposedly much tighter, be easier to pump (squeeze bottle) and last for thousands of liters of brackish water with no cleaning requirements mentioned.
I also noticed no technical info when I clicked it on the web page.
Personally I would stay far away until there was independent lab reviews and field testing, because this really doesn't add up.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
This is a very bold claim. Commercial virus filters that are in the ~20 nm pore size rating tend to have capacities measured in the hundreds of liters per square meter (1 m^2 = 10 ft^2)--even with very clean feed streams seen in the biotech industry--and cost anywhere from $3000 to $6000 for the same amount of area. They are also difficult to clean and difficult to protect with pre-filters because the crap that plugs them can be much smaller than the pore size of the filters (material can deposit on the inside of the pore walls).
Throughput can be improved by operating in a tangential flow mode (flow sweeping past the membrane surface to avoid junk build-up), but this isn't a straightforward way to operate a filter bottle.
I have significant doubts about these claims. The more so because this page is completely blank. They don't even give reduction values for the particles they claim to remove. 90% would be very poor performance...99.99% is wher eit ought to be. How do they validate the pore size of the membrane (integrity test)? Many questions, 0 answers.
There is no such country, and there never was. That the pastoral stories you read never mentioned water-born parasites and illnesses (except for the one Slavic fable, where a boy turns into a goat after drinking from a puddle agaisnt his older sister's cautioning), does not mean it never happened.
It is not so much due to the much maligned modern pollution, it is due to the many organisms, whose existence predates man's. Stomach worms are just one — and fairly benign — example.
And if must drink such unfiltered and unboiled water, don't drink from a lake or other standing water. Try to find the fastest running stream you can — you'll have a better chance...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Any good parent knows to expose your child to chicken pox at an early age to build up that immunity. Catching it as an adult can be fatal...
Poor people? No
Poor looters? Hell yeah!
At that price, I think I'll just buy water that's already been purified.
Deleted
Ahhh, good point. I stand corrected and you are absolutely right that Katrina did quite a lot of damage to the Mississippi/Louisiana coast.
Not going to spend karma on this one but...
At least in the church I grew up in...
Before a baby is baptized, they don't have the stain of original sin washed away, and so they don't go to Heaven or Hell or anywhere else. So without the baptism, the little foetus isn't a person in the spiritual sense.
I would much rather see a foetus aborted than to be born, unloved and miserable and have to struggle through a hostile life. It probably would have been better for everyone involved if my sister and I had been aborted.
Not sure how it stacks up to the competition now, but when I bought it, it looked like it was one of the better models available. Ceramic (or diatomacious earth -- forget which, exactly) gravity-fed filter with activated charcoal core. When the filters are in good shape (new, or recently cleaned and boiled), some of the best water I've ever tasted. Being all stainless steel, it imparts no plastic flavors into the water.
Method of processing duck feet
Levees will fail. Pumps will fail. FEMA will fail to respond. The solution is much simpler: prohibit building anything (except a boat ramp) below the waterline, or be prepared to change the name from New Orleans to New Venice.
John
http://www.lifestraw.com/en/high/maincont2.asp Ths company is producing water filtration straws for $3 each for people in third world countries. E.
The problem is the idea that you can keep a historic city below sea level and nothing bad will ever happen.
You seem to have forgotten about a little place called Atlantis. Thousands of years below sea-level and I've never heard any bad stories. In fact, their Chupacabra production levels are at an all-time high. I've heard that famous celebrities like Elvis Presley and Bigfoot own real-estate there...
I think the actual problem was that they built a city below sea level. And now, instead of concluding "hey, maybe that wasn't such a good idea afterall," they're building it again.
Glad you're saying that for the "last time", because it's completely ignorant!
Or, maybe I'm missing the connection between the levees in New Orleans and the trail of destruction that Katrina left along a hundred mile stretch of the gulf coast.
Well, New Orleans wasn't "built" below sea level, it just sank to that point... When it was constructed the land was chosen BECAUSE it was the highest land near the mouth of the Mississippi. The problem is the weight of the city has caused the land to sink over time, resulting in it actually being BELOW sea level currently.
A straw costing 3 US$ - Purifies minimum 700 litres of water - Kills and removes 99.999% of all waterborne bacteria - Kills and removes 98.7% of all waterborne viruses - Removes particles down to 15 microns -Requires no electrical power or spare parts for the life time of the straw.
Same technology I suppose but the brit has made it with the twist of making it with a carrying container at the same time.
I would howewer think that the 3 US$ straw in combination with hoses and existing containers (if cleaned before) would do the trick for a fraction of the price and be more practical/flexible.
Though Kudos for trying to think about the impending water crisis.
Try a dirty water enema. Instead of drinking water that is too dirty, just give yourself an enema with it. The colon isn't just for quickly absorbing ecstacy, it absorbs water as well and its pretreated for filth!
crap.
Damn near every major outdoor manufacturer that produces camp cook sets and the like have some form of water filter. This isn't particularly new, or special except the amount of time the filter lasts. If (and I stress if) it works as well as it says it's a good thing because it's easier to use than most other modern filter systems too, but at that price I don't see it getting much commercial use. It's simply too expensive.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
You read it, guys. This bottle can even purify fecal matter!
nt
Can you run holy water though it to make it safe for vampires?
If they can afford a $400 purifier. Then they would just move from the affected area or buy bottled water.
Ceramic Water Filter
Produced using traditional pottery techniques using local resources (except for the tiny amount of colloidal silver as antibacterial agent impregnated into the ceramic filter).
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I'm excited because this is the first filter I've heard of than can get the viruses. But I wonder if that makes it even MORE susceptible to clogging by glacial "flour," the super-fine particulate which is found in glacial runoff.
I've drank glacial runoff that looked exactly like MILK before. It was close to the source, so I didn't purify it. But I would never run such water through a filter because you are guaranteed to destroy it. You have to at least let it settle for a good 24 hours in a container before filtration, and even then I'd be hesitant to do it.
n/t
I lolled in my pants, roffle.
Mass nouns can be pluralized to indicate multiple types of mass. For instance, "I ate lots of meat" and "I ate several lunch meats."
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I've had a small, self-contained filter like this for years and years. I wouldn't want to put the input straight into thick raw sewage but it's fine for contaminated river water.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
You don't see much of the sun light when you feet caught in 3 feet of water. As a life-saving device, I would say no.
For sure everyone can afford a 400$ bottle freely available everywhere a your local corner store, OH wait true, my corner store was pulverized by a tsunami.
Destructive? Not really, when compared to something like Andrew or Hugo
You want destruction? Try a tornado! The one the linked wiki article is about is one (ok, two that came through at the same time) that hit my town last year. The photos don't come close to doing justice to reality.
The building pictured in the article was a very short walk from the apartment I lived in. Its massive steel girders were bent like pladough. The tree with the three foot diameter trunk behind the apartment looked like a weed someone had stepped on (Godzilla?). There were mobile homes torn in half, cinderblock buildings with half the building gone and thousands of five inch long wood splinters embedded in the concrete. There were trees with five foot diameter trunks and larger uprooted. Utility poles with the middle of the pole snapped out and the top hanginhg by the wires (I was without power for a week). It was a sea of yellow and red building insulation, trash, and debris.
If Osama Bin Laden had walked through my neighborhood he'd have said "holy fucking shit! We can't hurt these people, we might as well give up!"
My neighborhood looked like a war zone. And it was "only" an F-2. I can't possibly imagine what an F-5 would be like (flatness, I guess).
here are some pictures, which as I say, don't do justice to reality at all.
-mcgrew... oh wait, that was about teh terroristz. here is one where the tornado sirens went off, but no tornado. I never blogged about the actual tornado, because my computer won't work without the electricity I was out of for a week, nor can I get on the internet without the cable connection that was down for an entire month.
Yep, F5's produce flatness, indeed.
:)
I remember that Tornado because I was living in Austin at the time. Incredible. Even more incredible that more people did not die. Funny...I seem to remember ALL of the bad tornadoes that were close.
The real problem is that city/state legislators kept on adding new housing etc in areas that were below sea level. The motivation to do this is purely financial: driven by tax takes etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Parent is not flamebait. By the way, KDAWSON is gay!
To wasting another precious modpoint!
andrew and hugo weren't that bad either. Both areas were under a land boom and much of the damage was poorly constructed houses and/or building in vulnerable areas . Many houses built with real wood and nails in less vulnerable areas made it through when the stapled ones didn't.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
sounds like a worth while development.
http://www.lifestraw.com/
The people who died from contaminated water couldn't afford $3.85. Nice technology but crappy accessibility.
Yes, they can. However, in Latin, Virus is not pluralised. Please go here.
Or learn the language.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Seems like there is a wide variety of portable water purifucation system alrady available for back packers etc, most of these are much less expensive. The people who really need this technology don't have ~$400 to spend, especially when you can get a device that will do the same thing (Katydin pumps etc) for around $50. Also you can boil water for even less, or you can use iodine tablets, or household bleach, doesn't taste great, but works. Seems like this device expensively solves a problem that doesn't exist.
"But you don't understand. This is where I grew up. This is where my kids will grow up. I want to rebuild right here, exactly how it was."
This is the typical response you will get. But you can't just rebuild easily. So you look at the options.
They don't exactly have the money or the infrastructure to transplant roughly 1 million people to a different location. And you can't exactly do that overnight, either. So moving them to a different part of the city in a few months is out.
I don't think there's any city that could move that many people and infrastructure that quickly, either. So transplanting them in another city is out.
I have said this before, FEMA wasn't designed to fix a problem this big. Not that they managed their resources all that well, anyway. FEMA is actually fairly good about fixing localized problems, along with local and state help. This problem was across at least 2 states, and was 1 of 4 major hurricanes (another which had 2 separate landfalls). You can't just fix something that large overnight.
15 million Chinese already drink their urine for 'health benefits'
My sweetwater filter pump goes way smaller than 15,000 microns and was $80...
http://www.msrcorp.com/filters/sweet_system.asp
You are just assuming it lives up to it's exceptional claims.
The tighter a filter is, the harder it is put water through it. The easier it clogs and the sooner needs cleaning.
If you have used a a much more coarse Hiking filter you realize that this device is making claims that seem to require not just new technology but new physics.
This strikes me more likely a scam.
You sort of supported the point about the Levees.
Had the levees not failed after the hurricane, there would be more national awareness of the more significant damage to the east of New Orleans.
The fact that people outside of the damaged area still talk about Katrina is really due to an Engineering/Maintenence failure.
If it were not for the levees, Katrina would have dropped from public discussion just like Cindy, Dennis, Rita, and Wilma (The other Hurricanes that made US Landfall in the 2005 Season).
The problem with this approach is that it's only effective if you can prevent contamination of the exterior of the bottle, which would require either sanitizing it after filling (which could be tough to do) or very careful filling, along with a foolproof (ha!) seal at the cap. Maybe a good solution would be to include alcohol wipes, since hands would potentially get contaminated as well. Still, it seems like an overall net gain. Personally I plan to get a reverse osmosis setup anyway, since the water here is so bad that even a single drop leaves visible mineral deposits (at least I hope they're minerals), and boiling results in a disgusting film forming on the top. Not that it would work without water pressure, (or if my house was washed away, for that matter) but a much more common problem is that the tap water is non-potable for weeks after a storm due to contamination of the water supply.
And call me crazy, but when there's a storm approaching, we always stock up on a few weeks worth of water and nonperishable food. We're not exactly in the 19th century where you just wake up one day and there's a hurricane outside. Proper preparation blah blah..
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
They didn't build it below sea level, dumbass. They built it above sea level at a good location for a sea port, and it sank over the next few centuries. The French who started the city in 1718 didn't know it would sink, just like the founders of Helike, Greece didn't expect their city to sink overnight in 373 BC.
A right. because building below sea level is a great idea.
Worked for Venice.
- Nothing to see hear.
A major portion of Mississippi's coastal cities were wiped out by direct action of Katrina. New Orleans was not the only place destroyed by Katrina. Levees had nothing to do with the destruction in Mississippi and the more inland portions of Louisiana. You and whoever is modding you up are ignorant about what happened during and after Katrina.
Remember most of the Katrina water was salt water so this device would have been worthless.
I'm thinking that, for £190 one could buy many hundred liters of bottled water. Considering a person requires about 2 liters daily for drinking, cooking, and toilet use this is about a month's worth for a family.
Besides, if you're without clean water for longer than a month, it might be a clue that it's time to take your family and leave.
Mod parent up. Store your pee immediately after the first sign of trouble, which is when the water portion of your pee is still high enough. If you store your pee by the time you're dehydrating, the water portion of your pee will be very low.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
I used a First Need filter 15 years ago as a primary water source for a 2-week hike on the Appalachian Trial. In that environment, there is a natural desire to carry as little water as possible to keep weight down, which obviously creates a need to gather water with some frequency.
I used it to filter everything from puddled water from recent rain, to water straight from the Potomac, to old, stinky water found inside of a hollow tree stump.
In all cases, the filter removed all coloration, taste, and noticeable odor, along with the nastiest of pathogens. During that two weeks, the filter never clogged or even appreciably slowed, though we were always careful to go easy on the thing by not stirring up any particulate matter during the filtration process.
Highly recommended to any sane person who wants to make sure that they've always got clean drinking water available but thinks that $385 is a bit expensive.
Kid-proof tablet..
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/14/fema.audit/index.html
victims, predominantly dark-skin monkeys who bring nothing but crime, get $2000 debit cards and reportedly spent on lap-dance, Lous Vuitton bags, jewelry and HDTVs. They can afford everything, let alone their profit from drug selling. Wherever these nigger goes there will be a surge in crime rate. We must isolated these animals from the normal people in order to bring our country to the right path again!
You can stop the kinks in MSR filters by leaving a loop of tube before wrapping and stowing it. The tube will only kink at the junction if it's already been stresses. Resolving a stressed tube on an MSR is easy. Just remove the tube and cut off 2cm the reattach.
Venice is built ON the sea, not below. It is also built on an inner sea, with little tide and mostly pleasant weather, not on an hurricane-prone ocean coast.
We're missing something important here.
We have the LifeStraw, LifeSaver Bottle, and other consumer filtering devices.
So why are children in 3rd world countries still dying every day from drinking dirty water?
Chalk up another one for us lucky consumers, with piles of shit we don't need to stuff into landfills while kids die who simply would rather have clean water than the latest plastic toy.
For a minute I though I'd wandered into /b/.
What about the rebuilding part? Are you saying that they still don't realize it's below sea level?
I wasn't addressing that part, only the assertion that the city was originally built below sea level. Any idiot knows the land wasn't below sea level back in the 1700s.
Yes, the wisdom of rebuilding it when it's now under sea level is questionable. There are arguments for it, however; after all, a very large part of the Netherlands is below sea level, and they seem to get along just fine that way, and have a lot more land than they would otherwise. The City of NO has a lot of valuable history, since it is after all one of the oldest cities in North America which isn't in ruins. I would argue that the French Quarter is definitely so valuable that it should be preserved. However, as the recent flooding showed, the FQ wasn't all that vulnerable anyway, the lower 9th Ward was, which is a ghetto. The FQ escaped with only minor damage. Other arguments about rebuilding NO revolve around its status as a busy seaport because of its proximity to the mouth of the Mississippi river; all the port workers, as well as all the workers for all the support industries, have to have someplace to live that's convenient to that port.
But this is all another question which I'm not attempting to answer here since I don't actually have all the answers. My main point before was to call out and insult someone who spouted the often-repeated and completely idiotic idea that New Orleans was built below sea level.
And of course in order you to call him a retard you had to ignore half of what he wrote, as if it were somehow common knowledge that it was previously above sea level, and completely "retarded" to think that since it is clearly below it now that it wasn't that way before.
Don't be such an idiot. I didn't ignore half of what he wrote, but it wasn't relevant anyway since the first half of what he wrote was so ridiculously stupid.
And it should be common knowledge that it was previously above sea level; you don't even have to know anything about the city other than its age to realize that, most likely, it wasn't like that before. Then, a quick Google search will confirm it. Instead, morons like that go around spreading lies, and then try to claim ignorance. If you don't know, don't make an ass of yourself by lying.
Typically low lying areas (with no useful economic purpose) are used as cheap dumps for construction waste( torn up sidewalk, old brick from a building, just plain dirt that needed to be moved, and probably regular trash that shouldn't be there) Why haven't the sinking areas been gradually filled with such waste? Eventually these lands are worth more since they are flat and can be built on more easily.
A simple ordinance that states any new structure or any significant repair to a structure must be raised above above sea level such that at current sinking rates, the building will remain above sea level until the end of its expected lifespan.
Would look funny with all the houses sitting on top of miniature hills but eventually the whole area would be filled in. (well all the structures would be above sea level, at some point the infrastructure connecting the structures would be raised by the same method. With he appropriate ramps built in the mean time.
rivers and lakes have fish living/crapping in them non stop :)
the safe water comes from springs, and not just any spring,
but springs that rise up from deep sand or deep rock (read GIANT FILTER)
and also springs that boil like the dickens (HOT water)