Electrified Cotton Filter Soaked in Nanotech Cheaply and Quickly Purifies Large Volumes of Water
Silver Nanowires A microscope image shows the silver nanowires in which the cotton cloth is dipped. Courtesy of Yi Cui, Stanford University Water, water everywhere, but in the developing world or in areas ravaged by natural disasters - like the ongoing flooding in Pakistan, for instance - there's often not a clean, purified drop to be found. Water is usually made potable in such places via filters that physically trap bacteria as water flows through, but researchers at Stanford have shown devised a high-speed filter composed of nothing but plain cotton cloth and nanotubes that can quickly filter nearly all bacteria from dirty water using less power than slower conventional water purifiers. Most water filters simply trap living bacteria as it passes through a series of tiny pores, a method that is effective but prone to a variety of problems. For one, they are painfully slow, and in disaster situations that can...