Page 7397
May 23, 2020
How NASA is recycling urine into drinking water
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: space, sustainability
As a life support engineer at NASA Ames Research Center, it’s Michael Flynn’s job to keep astronauts alive in space, making sure they have the basic necessities like clean water to survive. But launching clean water into space is cost-prohibitive, so for years, Flynn and his team have been working on new ways to recycle waste water into safe, drinking water. SmartPlanet visits Flynn’s lab and looks at how he’s doing it through a process known as “forward osmosis.”
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com
May 23, 2020
Water recycling, reuse could dramatically slash cities’ need for fresh water resources, research shows
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: futurism, sustainability
Using Houston as a model, researchers at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering have developed a plan that could reduce the need for surface water (from rivers, reservoirs or wells) by 28% by recycling wastewater to make it drinkable once again.
While the cost of energy needed for future advanced purification systems would be significant, they say the savings realized by supplementing fresh water shipped from a distance with the “direct potable reuse” of municipal wastewater would more than make up for the expense.
And the water would be better to boot.
May 23, 2020
72 people test positive for coronavirus after mass lockdown protest in Wisconsin
Posted by Lon Anderson in category: biotech/medical
Hundreds of people attended demonstration, many of them not wearing masks.
“The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested for at least one serious new crime, and more than half are re-incarcerated within three years of release.”
The announcement last summer that the number of Americans behind bars had increased for the 37th consecutive year in 2009 provoked a fresh round of grim editorializing and national soul-searching. With its prisons and jails now holding more than 2.4 million inmates — roughly one in every 100 adults — the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any free nation. As a proportion of its population, the United States incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany, and 12 times more than Japan. “No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free,” The Economist has declared.
But a highly significant fact went largely unremarked amid the hubbub: The population of the nation’s state prisons, which house all but a relative handful of convicted felons, decreased by nearly 3,000. Although the drop was slight in percentage terms, it was the first since 1972. (State prisons held 1.4 million inmates at the end of 2009 and federal prisons more than 200,000, while the number held in local jails, mostly for minor crimes, averaged about 770,000 over the course of the year, and the majority had yet to face trial.) In California, which has the nation’s largest state prison system, with nearly 170,000 men and women behind bars, the prison population fell for the first time in 38 years. The national prison population — including those held in federal facilities — grew by less than one percent, the slowest rate in the last decade.
May 23, 2020
Analysis on United States’ $42B Addiction Rehab Industry; 1983–2018, 2020 & 2025
Posted by Brent Ellman in categories: biotech/medical, business
DUBLIN, Jan. 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The “The U.S. Addiction Rehab Industry — 5th Edition” report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com’s offering.
Drug, alcohol and other addiction rehab in the United States is big business — $42 billion this year.
There are now 14,000+ treatment facilities and growing. A total of 3.7 million persons received treatment, but many more need it and facilities are filled to capacity. Insurance coverage for rehab has increased, but scandals abound as shoddy facilities opened and patient brokering, overbilling and deceptive marketing became common. Reforms are pending. Private equity firms are investing.
“Almost 21 million Americans have at least one addiction, yet only 10% of them receive treatment. Drug overdose deaths have more than tripled since 1990. From 1999 to 2017, more than 700,000 Americans died from overdosing on a drug. Alcohol and drug addiction cost the U.S. economy over $600 billion every year.”
Addiction is more common than many realize. Millions of Americans of all walks of life struggle with drug and alcohol addiction every day.
May 23, 2020
Elon Musk Is the Hero America Deserves
Posted by Kelvin Dafiaghor in category: Elon Musk
I want to meet my hero.
Ashlee Vance interviews the billionaire entrepreneur on his Twitter usage, selling off his possessions, and the historic upcoming launch.
May 23, 2020
Laser cooling a nanomechanical oscillator close to its ground state
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: energy, quantum physics
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and IBM Research Europe recently demonstrated the laser cooling of a nanomechanical oscillator down to its zero-point energy (i.e., the point at which it contains a minimum amount of energy). Their successful demonstration, featured in Physical Review Letters, could have important implications for the development quantum technologies.
May 23, 2020
Coronavirus vaccine developed in China shows promise after early study in 100 people
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: biotech/medical
A potential coronavirus vaccine developed in China appeared safe and able to generate an immune response after an early trial in more than 100 people.