Powder that purifies water from Escherichia coli. Free Technical Library News

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Powder that purifies water from E. coli

06.06.2023

Scientists at Stanford University have developed a cheap method to purify water using powder and sunlight. Existing chemical water treatment technologies can leave toxic by-products and waste a lot of resources.

The new approach is based on the addition of harmless metal powder to polluted water, which absorbs both ultraviolet radiation and sunlight.

The powder consists of nanoparticles of aluminum oxide, molybdenum sulfide, copper and iron oxide. The mixture is then exposed to sunlight. After absorbing solar photons, the molybdenum sulfide catalyst allows photons to displace electrons. The released electrons then react with water, creating hydrogen peroxide and hydroxyl radicals. These compounds quickly destroy bacteria by damaging cell membranes.

In an experiment with a 200 ml glass of water contaminated with about a million E. coli bacteria per milliliter, all pathogens were killed within 60 seconds of adding the powder. The chemical by-products that form with the help of sunlight dissipated quickly.

At the same time, the powder is recyclable: iron oxide makes it possible to remove nanoparticles from water with a conventional magnet. In tests, the same powder was used 30 times to treat 30 different samples of contaminated water.

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Drones are controlled by gestures 29.03.2012

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe that in the near future, unmanned aerial vehicles will be able to perform taxiing along the runway, focusing on the standard gestures of ground personnel.

UAVs are already capable of auto-landing, but runway traffic is still continuously monitored from a remote control held by the operator. In some cases, ground personnel simply manually push the drone to the right place. Manned military aircraft do without additional difficulties - pilots simply follow standard gesture commands: open / close hatches, start engines, taxi to the desired lane, drive into the hangar, etc.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to test whether UAVs could recognize hand gestures and follow the same commands as pilots. This would be extremely useful in busy military bases and especially on the deck of an aircraft carrier. It should be noted that many terrestrial robots, such as AlphaDog, successfully recognize hand gestures and obediently follow human commands.

As experiments by MIT specialists have shown, video cameras and drone computers, using a special computer algorithm, are quite capable of recognizing simple gestures and performing appropriate actions. Initially, the positions of the body, hands and fingers of the operator corresponding to various gestures were recorded in the computer memory, after which the computer compared the picture from the video cameras with the images recorded in the memory. The algorithm developed by scientists allowed the UAV to recognize 76% of the gestures used by personnel working on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

The researchers are currently working on improving the reliability of the algorithm and are confident of their success. In the future, "smart" UAVs will be able to move along the runway and deck of an aircraft carrier in the same way as manned vehicles, which will reduce the complexity of operating drones and increase flight safety.

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