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Water from the air

07.12.2018

As you know, there are certain problems with liquid water on Mars: so far, only periodically occurring small salty streams have been found. Therefore, even if some living organisms could survive there to this day, they would have to live very difficult. Unfortunately, despite the fact that there is much more water on Earth than on Mars, millions of people now have difficulty accessing this very water. From year to year the situation does not get better: there are more and more people on the planet, and there is less and less clean, drinkable water. Therefore, the attention of many researchers is riveted to the problem of developing affordable methods for obtaining fresh water.

One way to get water where there isn't any is to get it from the air, because there is always some water vapor in the air. To do this, for example, you can collect droplets of fog, although these fogs are not always and not everywhere formed. If it is possible to use electricity in large volumes and at low cost, then water can be obtained due to its condensation on a cooled surface. Drops of water flowing out of every air conditioner in summer are a clear illustration of this method. But besides the "physical" methods of obtaining water, there is also a "chemical" one. For example, you can first absorb water from the air with some kind of sorbent, and then force this sorbent to release water, but not into the air, but into the desired container.

Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have developed a polymer material that has the necessary properties to deliver water outside laboratory walls. To do this, they took an affordable and harmless substance - calcium chloride, known for its high hygroscopicity.

The ability of this compound to absorb water is so high that the initially dry substance can dissolve itself due to the water taken from the air. To prevent calcium chloride from leaking anywhere, it was placed inside a specially created hydrogel based on polyacrylamide. Such a hydrogel can efficiently absorb water while maintaining its geometric shape. In order for the resulting substance to give up the collected water without much effort, carbon nanotubes were added to its structure, which improve the heating of the gel under the action of sunlight.

To make the hydrogel they created work, the researchers put together a simple device, literally from a food container and pieces of foil. With the help of this simple device, in which 35 grams of dry hydrogel were placed, 37 grams of pure water were collected in less than a day. The cost of a device capable of producing 3 liters of drinking water per day, according to calculations, can be even less than $3.

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Limited information motivates children to learn 04.07.2021

Researchers at Rutgers University found that limited information motivates young children to learn. According to the study, preschool children are sensitive to the difference between how much they know and how much they still have to learn.

Preschool children tend to choose to gather more information about something if it interests them. This ability creates the perfect combination of insecurity and curiosity in children and motivates them to learn more.

The study focused on how the level of knowledge of children affects what information they are interested in. The data obtained indicate that children are attracted not only by the novelty of information. Children are naturally curious, scientists say, but the tricky question is how to harness that natural curiosity.

In a series of experiments, the authors developed personal and online storybooks to measure how many 3- to 5-year-old preschoolers knew about different "knowledge areas". The experiment also assessed their ability to understand a specific topic, such as contagion, and asked how the children's current level of knowledge predicted their interest in learning about the subject, including whether someone would get sick after playing with a sneezing friend.

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