Researchers at the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering have created a new method of cleaning micropollutants from water, using zwitterionic molecules — i.e., molecules with the same number of positive and negative charges.
Devashish Gokhale, a PhD student and one of the researchers, explained zwitterionic molecules by comparing them to magnets.
“On a magnet, you have a north pole and a south pole that stick to each other, and on a zwitterionic molecule, you have a positive charge and a negative charge which stick to each other in a similar way,” he said in a release by MIT News.
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