Researchers discover game-changing method to unlock clean water for billions of people: 'Can also be used to distill groundwater'
A team led by associate professor Masatoshi Kondo at the Institute of Science Tokyo, has developed a method to use liquid tin to desalinate seawater and recover valuable metals simultaneously, utilizing solar heat as the primary energy source. Unlike traditional desalination, which consumes significant amounts of electricity and generates toxic brine, this method is low-waste, low-energy, and high-reward.
"Unlike conventional methods, large consumption of electricity is not necessary, enabling the development of a sustainable process," said Dr. Kondo.
Over four billion people experience water scarcity each year, and the demand for clean drinking water continues to increase. Traditional desalination can help — but it's costly, energy-hungry, and generates an estimated over five billion cubic feet of brine daily. That's enough to fill around 50,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, often dumped back into oceans where it harms marine life.
This is where Dr. Kondo and his research team come in. Co-authored by doctoral student Toranosuke Horikawa, then-bachelor student Mahiro Masuda, and assistant professor Minho Oh from Science Tokyo, their study aims not only to find a simple solution to desalination but also to transform the brine from an environmental issue into a resource.
Kondo's team flips the script by using the brine as a resource instead of waste. Here's how it works. Brine is sprayed onto molten tin. The heated tin evaporates the water, leaving behind a mix of useful metals, including magnesium, calcium, and potassium. As the tin cools, it releases these metals for recovery. Meanwhile, the steam condenses into distilled fresh water.
This isn't just a lab curiosity — it's a game-changer for public health, especially in areas hardest hit by drought, contamination, or poor infrastructure. Researchers can also adapt the process to treat polluted groundwater, including arsenic-contaminated sources that pose a threat to millions worldwide. And because it relies on heat — ideally from solar power — it could bring clean water access to off-grid or resource-limited communities.
"The proposed technology … can also be used to distill groundwater polluted with arsenic without consuming large amounts of energy or producing waste," Dr. Kondo added.
Though still in the research phase, this discovery could mark a major leap forward in sustainable water treatment. It tackles two issues at once — clean water access and resource recovery — while keeping environmental impact low. If scaled successfully, it could reduce costs, decrease pollution, and help stabilize ecosystems affected by over-extraction and drought.
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Scientific American
a day ago
- Scientific American
Trump Cuts Could End U.S. Exploration of the Outer Solar System
In the spring of 2022 the U.S. space community selected its top priority for the nation's next decade of science and exploration: a mission to Uranus, the gassy, bluish planet only seen up close during a brief spacecraft flyby in 1986. More than 2.6 billion kilometers from Earth at its nearest approach, Uranus still beckons with what it could reveal about the solar system's early history—and the overwhelming numbers of Uranus-sized worlds that astronomers have spied around other stars. Now President Donald Trump's proposed cuts to NASA could push those discoveries further away than ever—not by directly canceling the mission but by abandoning the fuel needed to pull it off. The technology in question, known as radioisotope power systems (RPS), is an often overlooked element of NASA's budget that involves turning nuclear fuel into usable electricity. More like a battery than a full-scale reactor, RPS devices attach directly to spacecraft to power them into the deepest, darkest reaches of the solar system, where sunlight is too sparse to use. It's a critical technology that has enabled two dozen NASA missions, from the iconic Voyagers 1 and 2 now traversing interstellar space to the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers presently operating on Mars. But RPS is expensive, costing NASA about $175 million in 2024 alone. That's largely because of the costs of sourcing and refining plutonium 238, the chemically toxic, vanishingly scarce and difficult to work with radioactive material at the heart of all U.S. RPS. The Fiscal Year 2026 President's Budget Request (PBR) released this spring suggests shutting down the program by 2029. That's just long enough to use RPS tech on NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission, a nuclear-powered dual-quadcopter drone to explore Saturn's frigid moon Titan. After that, without RPS, no further U.S. missions to the outer solar system would be possible for the foreseeable future. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. 'It was an oversight,' says Amanda Hendrix, director of the Planetary Science Institute, who has led science efforts on RPS-enabled NASA missions such as Cassini at Saturn and Galileo at Jupiter. 'It's really like the left hand wasn't talking to the right hand when the PBR was put together.' Throughout its 400-odd pages, the PBR repeatedly acknowledges the importance of planning for the nation's next generation of planetary science missions and even proposes funding NASA's planetary science division better than any other part of the space agency's science operations, which it seeks to cut by half. But 'to achieve cost savings,' it states, 2028 should be the last year of funding for RPS, and 'given budget constraints and the reduced pipeline of new planetary science missions,' the proposed budget provides no funding after 2026 for work by the Department of Energy (DOE) that supports RPS. Indeed, NASA's missions to the outer solar system are infrequent because of their long durations and the laborious engineering required for a spacecraft to withstand cold, inhospitable conditions so far from home. But what these missions lack in frequency, they make up for in discovery: some of the most tantalizing and potentially habitable environments beyond Earth are thought to exist there, in vast oceans of icy moons once thought to be wastelands. One such environment lurks on Saturn's Enceladus, which was ranked as the nation's second-highest priority after Uranus in the U.S.'s 2022 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey. 'The outer solar system is kind of the last frontier,' says Alex Hayes, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, who chaired the Decadal Survey panel that selected Enceladus. 'You think you know how something works until you send a spacecraft there to explore it, and then you realize that you had no idea how it worked.' Unlike solar power systems—relatively 'off-the-shelf' tech that can be used on a per-mission basis—RPS requires a continuous production pipeline that's vulnerable to disruption. NASA's program operates through the DOE, with the space agency purchasing DOE services to source, purify and encapsulate the plutonium 238 fuel, as well as to assemble and test the resulting RPS devices. The most common kind of RPS, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, converts the thermal energy released from plutonium 238's natural decay to as much as 110 watts of electrical power. Any excess heat helps keep the spacecraft and its instruments warm enough to function. Establishing the RPS pipeline took around three decades, and the program's roots lie in the bygone cold war era of heavy U.S. investment in nuclear technology and infrastructure. Preparing the radioactive fuel alone takes the work of multiple DOE facilities scattered across the country: Oak Ridge National Laboratory produces the plutonium oxide, then Los Alamos National Laboratory forms it into usable pellets, which are finally stockpiled at Idaho National Laboratory. Funding cuts would throw this pipeline into disarray and cause an exodus of experienced workers, Hendrix says. Restoring that expertise and capability, she adds, would require billions of dollars and a few decades more. 'These decisions are made by people that don't fully understand the implications,' says Ryan P. Russell, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at Austin. 'Technologically, [RPS] is on the critical path to superiority in space, whether that's military, civilian or industrial applications.' Russell emphasizes that RPS isn't just critical for exploring Uranus, Enceladus and other destinations in the outer solar system—it's also a likely fundamental pillar of the administration's space priorities, such as developing a sustained human presence on the moon and sending astronauts to Mars. While both destinations are relatively close to the sun, the Red Planet's global dust storms can bury solar panels, and the moon's two-week-long lunar nights are cold enough to test the mettle of even the best batteries. The latter situation informed the reasoning that drove NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy's directive last week to fast-track a lunar nuclear reactor. Abandoning smaller-scale nuclear options such as RPS while aiming for a full-scale reactor is 'like trying to build a house without a two-by-four,' Russell says. 'If you don't have the basic building blocks, you're not gonna get very far.' Another initiative reliant on RPS, NASA confirmed in a statement e-mailed to Scientific American, is the beleaguered Mars Sample Return (MSR) program that the U.S. agency has been jointly pursuing with the European Space Agency. While the White House has proposed nixing MSR, scientists and politicians view bringing Martian samples back to Earth as a key milestone in the modern-day space race against China. Meanwhile other nations are pursuing or preserving their own RPS capabilities, with Europe's sights set on americium 241, a radioisotope with a five-times-longer half-life but a five-times-weaker energy output than plutonium 238. Russia has used RPS for decades, and China and India are also developing homegrown versions of the technology. Notably, despite the administration's push for commercial partners to take up costly space functions such as rocket launches, RPS is unlikely to find much support in the private sector. 'Dealing with [this sort of] nuclear material—that's not something a company is going to do,' Russell says. Going forward, the planetary science community hopes to convince Congress that RPS is 'critical and foundational,' Hendrix says. The Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG), which was chartered by and provides independent input to NASA, expressed its concerns to the space agency in findings from a June meeting, writing that the decision would have 'dire implications' for future solar system exploration. White papers prepared by representatives of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center and Glenn Research Center conveyed similar sentiments, noting that nine of the 15 existing and future missions recommended in the latest Decadal Survey use RPS. In short, 'you're just hamstringing your ability to do certain mission configurations and also to get out to and past Saturn if you shut down RPS,' Hayes says. 'You can't argue that scientific prioritization was part of [the White House's] decision process.' Although both the House and Senate have released drafts of the 2026 appropriations bill that preserve top-line funding for NASA, neither explicitly mentions RPS. That means the program would fall under NASA's 'discretionary spending,' a category that scientists and legal experts alike say would be more easily manipulated by a presidential administration looking to enforce its political agenda. In other words, without a clear, direct callout for RPS from congressional appropriators, the Trump administration's plan to shut down the program could more easily come to pass. Hendrix consequently hopes that Congress will add language explicitly funding RPS in its final budget. 'There is a strong interest from Congress in the need for a powerful, deep-space energy source,' says a congressional staffer who is familiar with the NASA budget and was granted anonymity to discuss these issues freely. But 'I don't know that members have quite honed in on [RPS] yet because the worry is so much about [Trump's] intent to cancel a lot of future planetary missions.' Fundamentally, political support for outer solar system missions is a moot point without corresponding support for the ability to get there, explains University of Oregon planetary physicist and OPAG co-chair Carol Paty. The decision to shut down RPS 'seems like a simple line item,' she says. But the implications are 'deeply troubling and concerning. If there are not big missions to drive the community, to drive exploration, to drive training the next generation, where does that leave us?'
Scientific American
08-08-2025
- Scientific American
This Mushroom's Incredibly Bitter Taste Is New to Science
Ever bite into something so bitter that you had to spit it out? An ages-old genetic mutation helps you and other animals perceive bitterness and thus avoid toxins associated with it. But while most creatures instinctively spit first and ask questions later, molecular biologists have been trying to get a taste of what bitterness can tell us about sensory evolution and human physiology. A new study, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, is the first analysis of how taste receptors respond to a mushroom's bitter compounds—which include some of the most potently bitter flavors currently known to science. The bitter bracket mushroom is nontoxic but considered inedible because of its taste. Researchers extracted its bitter compounds, finding two familiar ones—and three that were previously unknown. Instead of tasting these substances themselves, the scientists introduced them to an 'artificial tongue' that they made by inserting human taste receptors into fast-growing embryonic kidney cells. One of the newfound bitter substances activated the taste receptors even at the lowest concentration measured, 63.3 micrograms per liter. That's like sensing three quarters of a cup of sugar in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Humans have about 25 kinds of bitter taste receptors lining our mouths and throats, but these same receptors also grow throughout the body —in the lungs, digestive tract and even brain. Despite their ubiquity, they have been only partially explored. Four of our bitter receptors have no known natural activator. Finding activating compounds could illuminate the interactions that might have shaped those taste receptors' evolution, says study lead author Maik Behrens, a molecular biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Previous research focused on bitter compounds from flowering plants, which evolved well after animals gained bitter taste receptors. Behrens thought that mushrooms, being older, might even activate one of the four mystery receptors. The bitter bracket mushroom didn't, but Behrens plans to keep looking—especially since this first chemical analysis of mushroom bitterness has already yielded previously unknown compounds. Such research can also unlock information about taste receptors' many functions in the human body. 'Taste in your mouth does so much more than just perception,' explains University of Miami physiologist Nirupa Chaudhari, who was not involved in the study. Taste can trigger physiological reflexes such as insulin release and stomach acid production, she says, so knowing what activates bitter taste receptors could improve our understanding of bodily processes and disease. Chaudhari considers the new study a good first step toward expanding bitter taste research. With the first analysis complete, researchers are now setting their sights on other mushrooms' bitter secrets—compounds and activated receptors you can't uncover by 'simply chewing on a mushroom,' Behrens says. It's Time to Stand Up for Science Before you close the page, we need to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and we think right now is the most critical moment in that two-century history. We're not asking for charity. If you become a Digital, Print or Unlimited subscriber to Scientific American, you can help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both future and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself often goes unrecognized.
New York Post
07-08-2025
- New York Post
New images show Manhattan-sized interstellar object that could be alien probe here to ‘destroy us': Harvard scientist
A Harvard physicist has asserted that new images of the Manhattan-sized interstellar object rocketing through our inner solar system back his claim that it's not a comet — but instead possibly an alien probe that may 'destroy us.' Dr. Avi Loeb is pointing to apparent smoking guns emanating from 31/ATLAS — the object discovered in early July motoring past Earth which NASA officials have deemed a simple, though aberrational, comet. 'Usually, for comets, you see a tail trailing behind the object,' Loeb told CNN Thursday. 'Here, the glow is actually in front of it. We've never seen such a thing. A comet doesn't glow in front.' 4 New images released by NASA show the 31/ATLAS emitting a glow from the front of its motion, contrary to how comets move. Jewitt et al. 2025 Loeb then called the glow 'puzzling' in a blog post and implied that the object could be directed by an intelligent species with their sights set on our pale blue dot. 'It may come to save us or destroy us. We'd better be ready for both options and check whether all interstellar objects are rocks.' Loeb cited two new images from The Hubble Space Telescope that show a concentration of light in front of the interstellar rock. The images, taken on July 21, represent the most recent publicly available data on the 31/ATLAS. In a blog post Wednesday, the theoretical astrophysicist wrote, 'The existence of a glow ahead of 31/ATLAS but no evidence of gas molecules is puzzling.' Loeb further reiterated claims made in a paper last month regarding the object's suspiciously specific flight path through our inner solar system. 4 31/ATLAS's flight path is ideal for measuring the size and motions of the planets, Dr. Loeb has claimed. NASA/JPL-Caltech 'It lies in the plane of the orbits of the planets around the sun to within five degrees,' Loeb explained to CNN. 'It will arrive closest to the sun when the Earth is on the opposite side. We won't be able to observe it. But that's the perfect time for it to maneuver.' In his recent paper, Loeb suggested that the pathway is ideal for observing and measuring the motion of the spheres in our solar system. 4 An image of the object taken by NASA's ATLAS space telescope. ATLAS/University of Hawaii/NASA The object will come closest to the Sun on Halloween and the intervening time will provide the best opportunity to glean information from the object. 'We will have a better assessment of this probability within a month or two, once 31/ATLAS gets brighter and easier to observe as it approaches the Sun,' Loeb wrote in a blog post last week. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla) is answering Loeb's calls for increased and vigilant observation of 31/ATLAS. 4 31/ATLAS in an image shared by NASA and the European Space Agency. AP 'I'm urging NASA to extend the Juno mission to study interstellar object 31/ATLAS,' Rep. Luna wrote on X last week. 'Thank you Avi Loeb for your continued dedication to exploring our universe. We must seize this opportunity for groundbreaking discovery.'
