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NASA Testing Breakthrough In Water Safety
Jerry James Stone writes "NASA and University of Utah chemists are developing advanced tech for testing the drinkability of water. The process just began a six-month run aboard the International Space Station. Water will be sampled either from the Space Station's or Shuttle's galley using a syringe. It is then forced through a chemically-imbued membrane, which changes color based on toxicity. The process itself will take about two minutes. It checks drinking water for iodine and silver, which are used to kill unwanted microbes."
How does checking for iodine and silver check for water safety? Also - proofreading would be nice - "which are to used kill..."? My god what do we pay editors for?
Cemil.
The device checks for disinfectant (Ag or I). That is neat and all, but I wouldn't go for a "breakthrough in water safety." Sure, disinfectant means fewer bugs in the water. I won't say that isn't one good indicator of safer drinking water. But there is a host of atomic and molecular toxins that the device does nothing about. The EPA regulates for about 20 different things, bacteria being only a small part of it.
So it's less a test of it's drinkability as one of whether it's yet been processed into drinkable water?
I was hoping for something that'd be useful to people in remote places who want to drink out of a river. I know the article mentions spin-offs for bangladesh.
I didn't RTFA but on the space station they are forcing syringes through membranes, what kind of godawful stuff are they DOING up there with all this money? More importantly, are they videotaping it (the code words aren't fooling me one bit)?
It might not be a good indicator if your neighbor is named Schrödinger.
English is not this
You have to do the test 9 times to be really sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm pretty sure SchrÃdinger isn't the neighbor's name. It's HIS.
So when NASA finally gets to Mars, they'll be able to test the water in the (chinese built) hotel and see if iits fit to drink.
Um, what are they going to do if the drinking water on the ISS shows up as toxic? It's not like they can get any more in a hurry. If my drinking water was tainted, I'd rather not know about it if I was in their situation I think. There might be some kind of placebo effect where simply knowing your drinking water is tainted might induce nausea.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Have a glass of piss to celebrate "Do we even have a machine!?"
Is there some aspect of this process that could conceivably be affected by microgravity? If not, the ISS is awfully expensive lab space.
The great thing about performing a test an odd number of times is there is always one final result which offers a majority.
Unfortunately, SchrÃdinger's cat is the best illustration of how that doesn't apply.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Oh you're fucking kidding me... SchrÃfdinger's?
I pasted the o with umlaut from a previous comment! How is that not formatted correctly?!
Edit: Pasting the A with a tilde seems to add an f after the letter. Seriously, fix that.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
They aren't testing toxicity, they're testing for effective disinfection (by ensuring there is the correct residual disinfectant remaining in the water). That's pretty uninteresting, actually. It's standard practice to test for a disinfection residual in the water treatment industry.
Common disinfectants are chlorine (either gaseous or in hypochlorites, e.g. sodium hypochlorite = liquid bleach, or calcium hypochlorite which is in the form of solid granules or tablets), chloramines (a chlorine/ammonia compound), ozone, and ultraviolet. Ultraviolet, of course, is a one-time hit and leaves no residual disinfecting agent in the water. Ozone dissipates quite rapidly, so the residual is gone in a short matter of time. Chlorine dissipates over the course of several days, while chloramines stay in the water for several weeks. Large water systems typically need a disinfectant which will stay in the water for several days or weeks, because it takes that long for the water to travel from the treatment plant out through the piping system to the edges of the distribution region. You have to have an adequate disinfectant residual even at the edges of your system in order to prevent microbial growth inside your pipes.
Frankly, I'm very not-impressed with TFA. This is somewhat better, it at least explains the disinfection process and why they need to test for these two substances (iodine and silver):
Of course, if you really want the low-down on the process, you get it from NASA's website...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Also - proofreading would be nice - "which are to used kill..."? My god what do we pay editors for?
Actually, that's a grammatical error present in the article. Sure, the Slashdot editors could have fixed it, but the treehugger.com editors should have fixed it first.
It's both of them simultaneously.
As long as they leave the *wanted microbes* alone.
so lets send some rednecks up there to test it for them
I believe the procedure is as follows:
1. Get someone to drink before you.
2. Wait for them to die.
Disclaimer: May not work for toxins that take more than 5 days of exposure to kill the subject.
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