To turn dirty lakewater into drinkable H2O, peel away the bark from a nearby tree branch and slowly pour water through the wood.
To get water and minerals up a tree, wood is comprised of xylem, porous tissue arranged in tubes for conducing sap from the roots upwards through a system of vessels and pores.
Tiny pores called pit membranes are scattered throughout the walls of the vessels, allowing sap to flow from one vessel to another, feeding various structures along a tree’s length.
Additionally, the pores also trap air bubbles, which could kill a tree if spread in the xylem.
“Plants have had to figure out how to filter out bubbles but allow easy flow of sap,” study author Rohit Karnik from MIT says in a news release .
So it’s a nice coincidence that the problems are similar.”
As Karnik’s team finds, a small piece of sapwood can filter out more than 99 percent of the E.
They tested their improvised filter using water mixed with particles ranging in size. coli through the sapwood filter, they saw how bacteria had accumulated around the pores in the first few millimeters of the wood.
Existing water-purification technologies that use chlorine treatments and membranes with nano-scale pores are expensive.
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/simple-tree-branch-filter-makes-dirty-water-drinkable
To get water and minerals up a tree, wood is comprised of xylem, porous tissue arranged in tubes for conducing sap from the roots upwards through a system of vessels and pores.
Tiny pores called pit membranes are scattered throughout the walls of the vessels, allowing sap to flow from one vessel to another, feeding various structures along a tree’s length.
Additionally, the pores also trap air bubbles, which could kill a tree if spread in the xylem.
“Plants have had to figure out how to filter out bubbles but allow easy flow of sap,” study author Rohit Karnik from MIT says in a news release .
So it’s a nice coincidence that the problems are similar.”
As Karnik’s team finds, a small piece of sapwood can filter out more than 99 percent of the E.
They tested their improvised filter using water mixed with particles ranging in size. coli through the sapwood filter, they saw how bacteria had accumulated around the pores in the first few millimeters of the wood.
Existing water-purification technologies that use chlorine treatments and membranes with nano-scale pores are expensive.
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/simple-tree-branch-filter-makes-dirty-water-drinkable
