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The moment when lighting strikes water
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ETA: Article here (can't believe I forgot this rip)
- A new study finds you can reduce the amount of microplastics you drink simply by boiling your water.
- Scientists are just beginning to understand the health risks associated with microplastic exposure.
- Nano- and microplastics are bits of plastic as tiny as one-thousandth of a millimeter in diameter.
Boiling and filtering your tap water may dramatically lower the amount of microplastics you drink, according to new research.
Recent studies have found that nano- and microplastics (NMPs), which are bits of plastic as tiny as one-thousandth of a millimeter in diameter, have been found in a host of products and even in tap water.
A new study, published February 28 in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, found that boiling mineral-rich water for just five minutes can reduce the amount of NMP you’re exposed to by up to 90%.
Scientists are just beginning to understand the health risks associated with microplastic exposureTrusted Source, but growing evidenceTrusted Source suggests the plastics can accumulate in the body and trigger oxidative stress, inflammation, insulin resistance, and liver issues.
Certain advanced water filtration systems can capture and help remove some NMPs from tap water. But researchers wanted to figure out other options to remove microplastics, especially since in poorer countries cheaper, more accessible solutions for clean water are needed.
Boiling water may be a safe, simple solution that can effectively decontaminate household tap water, the new findings suggest.
“Boiling water before drinking is a great example of an ancient cultural practice that can help reduce an environmental exposure,” Dr. Luz Claudio, PhD, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Healthline.
Claudio was not involved in the study.
How boiling water can help remove microplastics
The researchers found simply boiling water is the first step to removing NMPs from tap water.
The researchers collected multiple samples of tap water from Guangzhou, China and contaminated the samples with varying levels of NMPs.
Each sample was boiled for five minutes then left to cool for 10 minutes.
Boiling hard water that’s rich with minerals — such as calcium or magnesium — creates a chalk-like residue known as limescale, or calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which can trap the plastics.
That solid, chalky residue then had to be separated and removed from the water with a standard coffee filter or stainless steel filter, thereby removing NMPs.
The team found that the impact was greatest in harder water: In samples that had 300 milligrams of CaCO3, for example, nearly 90% of NMPs were removed.
In softer water samples with less than 60 mg of CaCO3, roughly 25% of NMPs were removed.
“What’s important to note here is that the effectiveness of trapping these micro/nano plastics in these mineral solids is tied to how hard the water is – the harder the water, the more solids are formed, the more microplastics are trapped,” Dr. Anja Brandon, PhD, the associate director of U.S. plastics policy at Ocean Conservancy and an environmental engineer, told Healthline.
Brandon was not involved in the study...
How to limit your exposure to microplastics
Anyone who wishes to boil their water should do so in a glass or stainless steel pot.
After boiling the water for about five minutes, let it cool, and do not stir it, Claudio says.
The microplastics need to bind to the calcium and fall to the bottom of the pot so they can filtered or scooped out."
-via Healthline, February 28, 2024
really needs to be said: We spent a CENTURY making drinking water safe, only for the Carbon Industry(of which plastic manufacture is a part) to pollute the world SO MUCH that everyone has to start boiling their water again.
zenosanalytic reblogged
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U ever have any container or appliance that you only ever put water inside you catch yourself thinking 'i only put water in this so I won't need to clean it very often'. That is the devil talking. Clean it. Or you will summon the Ooze.
depending on the calcium content of your water supply you might instead be summoning The Shell
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For 200 years, scientists have failed to grow a common mineral in the laboratory under the conditions believed to have formed it naturally. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan and Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan have finally succeeded, thanks to a new theory developed from atomic simulations. Their success resolves a long-standing geology mystery called the "Dolomite Problem." Dolomite—a key mineral in the Dolomite mountains in Italy, Niagara Falls, the White Cliffs of Dover and Utah's Hoodoos—is very abundant in rocks older than 100 million years, but nearly absent in younger formations. "If we understand how dolomite grows in nature, we might learn new strategies to promote the crystal growth of modern technological materials," said Wenhao Sun, the Dow Early Career Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at U-M and the corresponding author of the paper published today in Science. The secret to finally growing dolomite in the lab was removing defects in the mineral structure as it grows. When minerals form in water, atoms usually deposit neatly onto an edge of the growing crystal surface. However, the growth edge of dolomite consists of alternating rows of calcium and magnesium.
This is really fucking cool actually! That's a science question so famous it's in my textbooks and these guys just like, did the thing!
THEY SOLVED THE DOLOMITE PROBLEM??????
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gtn 29/ntn john 19:18/htn 31
atn river sweep incoming
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Carmody Groarke: Underground Spa (2008) Location: Limerick, Ireland
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magic pasta
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Hydroluminescence
(c) gifs by riverwindphotography,July 2023
Source: riverwindphotography
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So an "Alkaline Water" company gave a bunch people liver failure because their water was contaminated with hydrazine?? That's a new one.
Fun fact: Boston tap water has a pH above 9, they do that so it won't leech too much metal from old plumbing. If you want to drink alkaline water for cheap, just move to Beantown. Your sensitive aquarium fish will hate it.
Electricity + water + air makes for a pretty lousy ammonia generator, but it works. There are probably a lot of ways to get hydrazine out of it when you start dumping reactive chemicals in there, idk I'm not a chemist.
Look, we all know that Soviet military surplus is a great source for cheap lab equipment, I can't say I wouldn't be tempted. But what the hell.
Hang on. Hang on, it's been a minute since I did any chemistry, but wouldn't you get magnesium hydroxide out of KOH and MgCl2 if you fucked this up badly enough? You know, milk of magnesia? A powerful laxative?
Whatever, that's beside the point.
This is the company's legal defense. I feel bad for the lawyer, who had to walk into a courtroom and say those words with his own mouth.
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only-tiktoks
That last part is what kills me. These fucking Florida politicians, in the pocket of developers, KNOWINGLY destroying the watersource for their populace and not giving a single solitary damn. They know how hard they're making life for people; they know the alternatives are worse; they don't give a fuck >:(
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Unrestrained summer fun 😁
this must be such a delicate experience for a creature that can dive two stories deep and has been seen cliff diving into the ocean
fleshdyke
Such a quiet and gentle experience for a megafauna cryptid that can headbutt a speeding truck and walk away It’s like seeing Godzilla in a kiddie pool
During a summer heat wave in Alaska growing up (yes it’s a thing), my dad had several sprinklers and a tractor sprinkler going in the yard. From the woods behind the house suddenly came two young babies and a very large mother.
They came directly towards the tractor sprinkler and sat right down.
My dad verrrrry slowly pulled the hose of the other sprinklers, and repositioned them in the backyard so they would spray grass under the shade of several trees.
Lo and behold, the mother moose got up, walked over to the water now pooling beside these trees, and plomped down. The two babies followed after and just fell over in the cool water.
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“Abolish Golf”
Sticker spotted in Chicago, Illinois.
A typical golf course uses 200 million gallons of water a year. There are over 16,300 golf courses in the United States.
That's nuts.
Ngl I hate golf and I'm all for this. They put a golf course in our public park at the expense of hundreds of centuries-old live oak trees. Half of the walk around the park you're just looking at an empty golf course. Like 2 people want to play golf. So annoying.
Golf was a game developed in Scotland, where it rains up to 250 days of the year, and where the courses use very hard-wearing grass. The sand in the bunkers is because it used to be played on the coast - these traditional courses are called "Links" courses. The top Links course in Scotland, Royal Dornoch, uses no mains water at all. They have their own rainwater collection system.
It wasn't originally intended to be played in the middle of a desert on lush green turf that takes thousands of gallons of water a day to maintain. Unless you can keep the course alive using only rainwater collection, it shouldn't exist.