Experimental enhancement of a double-slope solar still using external reflectors and nano-coated absorber plates for solar desalination - Nature

IntroductionFreshwater supply is essential not only for life on the planet but also for industrial growth, economic development, and agricultural practices. The continuously growing freshwater demand and depleting natural water supply create a severe water shortage affecting two-thirds of the global population. The escalating global water crisis has created an urgent need to look to the oceans as a source of freshwater. However, current industrial ocean water desalination processes are energy-intensive, have a low water recovery ratio, and generate a high quantity of harmful brine, a mixture of concentrated salt and chemicals. For example, the widely used reverse osmosis (RO) and multi-flash desalination systems have recovery ratios of 0.42 and 0.22, respectively, and produce 0.6 to 6.7 kg of CO2 when desalinating one-cubic meter of ocean water1,2. Due to the low recovery ratios, the existing desalination systems discharge 58–78% of the inlet water as waste brines, which are either directly released to nearby water sources such as lakes, rivers, ocean shores, or injected underground or spread on land.

A digital illustration of a ball of electricity. (Vladlen Tian/iStock/Getty Images Plus) When you picture lightning, it tends to be fairly straightforward – a jagged gash of light that splits the sky, disappearing in less time than it takes to blink. But for centuries, a strange picture of a more eerie form has emerged. Thousands of records and eyewitness accounts have told of balls of lightning hovering above the ground before disappearing in a pop like soap bubbles. This fleeting phenomenon is all but impossible to study – and reports vary wildly in descriptions of its size, its hue, and even its behavior, making it one of the most peculiar mysteries in atmospheric science. But if you can't catch ball lightning in a field, physicist Chuliang Zhou and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have reasoned, maybe we can learn more by reproducing something like it in a lab. "Here we report the first controlled generation of a macroscopic, long-lived soliton driven by relativistic terahertz electromagnetic fields," the researchers write in a paper published in Nature Photonics.

Mercury ends its prograde motion and prepares to enter retrograde in Libra the Balance — spot it after sunset if you’re quick. Mercury hangs just 1° above the western horizon half an hour after sunset on October 24. Look for the stars of Scorpius in the southwest to help guide you toward the planet’s position. Credit: Stellarium