Articles

Boiling Drinking Water

This works - provided you boil the water for long enough. Some bugs are killed by bringing the water up to 70C, well below boiling, but some people claim you need to boil for at least 10 minutes. The author is not an expert on this, but suspects the 10 minutes bit is simply a precautionary overkill which has acquired legendary status. Research literature usually states that bringing the water to the boil will kill both E coli and G lamblia.

Contaminants

Contaminants may be present in groundwater or surface water as a result of natural processes or through mechanisms of displacement and dispersal related to human activities. There are two types of contaminants, that of point and non-point sources. Contaminants from point sources discharge either into groundwater or surface water through an area that is small relative to the area or volume of the receiving water body. Examples of point sources include discharge from sewage treatment plants, leakage from fuel storage tanks, and seepage from landfills or septic tanks.

Water Contaminants

Robot Fish Could Monitor Water Quality

Nature inspires technology for an engineer and an ecologist teamed up at Michigan State University. They're developing robots that use advanced materials to swim like fish to probe underwater environments.

"Fish are very efficient," explained Xiaobo Tan, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. "They can perform very efficient locomotion and maneuvering in the water."

Robotic fish - perhaps schools of them operating autonomously for months - could give researchers far more precise data on aquatic conditions, deepening our knowledge of critical water supplies and habitats.

National River Contaminants Program

River restoration has also become a priority for many catchment and resource managers looking to repair damaged rivers. Contaminants in rivers are central to this issue because they determine both the quality of irrigation and drinking water, and the condition of in-stream habitats for river dependent plants and animals. River contaminants fall into two broad categories: ﬁrstly, substances that occur naturally, but for which signiﬁcant increases in the amounts present contaminate the environment, and secondly, those that do not occur naturally, for which even small amounts may contaminate the environment.

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