For months as north korea ramps up missile and Nuclear Weapons tests but the headlines the news continues here on aljazeera other technics station thats watching. Documentaries. At this time on aljazeera. Water everywhere with less and less to drink. In space the earth is a big blue planet covered seventy percent in water the explosive reveals the only two and a half percent that is freshwater with any one percent being easily accessible to keep our six point eight billion inhabitants alive and well the United Nations report suggests that water consumption has grown twice as fast as population growth by twenty twenty five its estimated that two thirds of the population will live in water stressed regions of the world water scarcity is a serious problem globally its been said that will be wars fought over water this is techno a show about innovations that can change lives were going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity and were doing it in the unique way this is a show about science by scientists. When it comes to water scarcity part of the problem is that our modern world was built with little concern that water is a finite resource our society. Our economy our whole system of of living was based upon a paradigm of plentiful water and i dont think it was considered our what if we need to use less especially in agriculture the pressure to feed the world uses most of the fresh water supply sixty nine percent goes to farming with nineteen percent going to industry and only twelve percent of households in municipal use. I think we are unintentionally wasteful with water but we use more than we probably need to in an ideal situation but a part of is really learning how to use less water so with a global freshwater crisis upon us scientists like to don your financials. Working to create Innovative Solutions to help save fresh water supply. We begin in californias central case the scientists are looking at of joining down capturing water from a weather phenomenon thats been around for. Fog is a crucial part of the ecosystem and its a very interesting intriguing part of a very complex system that we call weather and its one that is much less understood on want to research in Monterey California and whats really interesting is the contrast between old and new technology on one side of me is a field of side of panels which is having a huge impact on the way energy is consumed in the micro area and then behind me is the age old technique of collecting water from fog which could provide a solution to the problem of global water scarcity. This seems to be a very Novel Technology but its actually been around for a while hasnt. Collection actually has been around for a long time longer than in some cases recorded history so how long have humans in trying to harvest as you can see evidence. Even ten thousand years ago in areas where some of the populations there actually established their bases and we know it from archaeological evidence where middens were found happen to be in locations that were heavily fogged areas the idea maybe from the past but the Science Behind it. All right and ill take a grab the tool. Theres the afternoon breeze. Were going to be i think on more on this. Carry out the parts that when assembled become. Ready to collect data. To deploy so why have you chosen three meters and between them because i want to have significant enough separation that one of these collectors want to check with the other one is picking up were going to anchor them down yes were going to anchor them down. We want them to treat be pretty steady. This is really engineering at its best im standing here was nestled pipes in my hands in the last net above my head which really is going to collect water from fog and its quite right now is this typical. Fog its not going to catch any fog in this in this weather right now because the fog up a couple hundred meters the fog literally has to be right where were standing and that typically is going to happen during the night and in the Early Morning hours before the sun comes and burns the fog away sorry another data point guys up exactly what is being studied here is how to create the most efficient folk catching device at the heart of it innovative mash designs some made of plastic to capture the maximum amount of water possible but work experimented with our different amounts of mesh in the standard is to use two layers so were actually collecting data on one two and three layers to see which one really does work better innovations in mesh design comes from what scientists call i am mimicry building on what Mother Nature has already created in this case taking keys from leaves that collect on trees can we emulate the surface of the leaf keep in mind a leaf has a lot of different surfaces different angles theres a lot of complexity in the surface that the wind can blow through and the little droplets of fall can collect on so one example. Is here. This is a type of mesh that is is actually made in a its called a shell mesh and it its a double layer of it is the standard type of mesh used for fog water collection and you can see theres actually different surfaces involved in this mash at different angles and in a sense this emulates what a tree would do the structure of this mash must be crucial thats one of the things that is a current area of research what is it about. That makes it an ideal collector theres a lot of interest in what type of materials make good is that the physical characteristics of the mash is that perhaps the chemical characteristics of the mash were still exploring what are all of the Details Associated with optimal fall collection under different environmental conditions it seems like quite. How much water can you collect you know in a standard day around here we might get during the fog event a leader fraction of a leader but there are some areas where we have some elevation where we get fog in some cases there i can get several gallons in a day or if you want to scale this up and have a giant. You know that would change everything when yeah there are places in the world where theyre doing that including a morocco for instance eritrea. Want to model haiti so theres a number of countries around the world that have that also have serious water needs where they are scaling these up so they have. Like this that are dozens of square kilometers in size that collect correspondingly that much more water because they have the area so how many nets it developed around the world at this time quest a Nonprofit Organization involved in Sustainable Water projects estimates that county two hundred folks that is ten countries are producing forty thousand liters of water a day an example of this is found in south america. There isnt a tree in sight in the hotshots a common does it. Stretching almost a thousand kilometers its known as the driest place on. The kiss is located in the Pacific Ocean the region is blanketed. And is common talk i think a lot of wonderful and i love of. The what the. They well and island a lot of villages have turned to a system of simple mess to catch a boy to from. Its a much simpler version of the folk to finance the studying and innovating in california but for the people of this it delivers a gift of life. And thats capture about ten thousand liters of water a day from folks. On the water is used to bring new life to the area. But. For the people of chile a simple water source is a gift from nature they dont concern themselves with the chemical makeup of their nets have captured. You lean on a little. Bit you should get. Back in the university of california santa cruz to peta vice penzias is conducting research on the safety of using collected folklore irrigation and human consumption as a chemist i came into the fog from the point of view of wanting to know what are the chemical compounds that are present in and by its very nature of being composed of very small water droplets are suspended in the air its very oppression at absorbing particles and gases and hurdles and gases often include toxic noxious compounds that have been released by human activities or in some cases Natural Sources and unlike raindrops that fall to the ground very quickly. This can be suspended in the ass for hours or even days absorbing a variety of Police Thousands and compounds places like the eastern China Shanghai japan and. Various cities in europe they have heavy smoke lots of aerosol particles heavy metal toxins such as mercury in the air and these can be absorbed and concentrated into the fog droplets the droplets then can strike vegetation or maybe the surface of the building and deposit those pollutants onto the surface where they would then be exposed to them youll studies have led g. T. Methylmercury in water that sounds incredibly boring that it even exists methylmercury could be formed and deeper waters of the ocean and then through coastal upwelling which is a process that brings a deeper water to the surface along the coasts especially along california that methylated mercury could come to the surface of the ocean and its a volatile as a gas so that it could escape the ocean water and possibly be taken up by a fog bank and sure enough we found that they contained roughly ten times higher methylmercury than we typically find in rain now should we be worried about it still the levels are very low. It would not be harmful for humans to inhale the fog water and absorb that methylmercury because the Health Threshold is still probably one hundred times greater than what we see in the bar but what about the most pristine parts of the wells connecting folks like weve seen in chile as far as we know there fog water is fit to drink and you would you drink if i was her connected six inch and a half inch away i probably would say have some songs of folk with a headache. Yes these were collected on some very foggy nights here at u. C. Santa cruz i wanted to show you a simple test that we could do and that is ph and so what i have here is just a small amount of the fog water trying ta go i just came out of the air and will compare that to some tap water and this is the kind of really the most basic test that youd want to do if you were to determine if the water was safe for drinking or for your geisha. And so for the tap water we would hope that the tap water is close to neutral p. Eight so thats a good test that one first was to stick this little ph strip in there and we compare it against our scale and it looks like its there we go and its about six and maybe slightly more than six so a neutral ph is seven tap water is about six so thats thats good now will test the fog water and if we were collecting this fogs in a very polluted location near maybe some coal fired power plants that the sulfur released from those in the shins would create sulfuric acid and this would be very acidic but fortunately here in santa cruz we dont have any such industries and so now measure the ph lets compare the two weve got the tap water here on the right and the fog water on the left and i would conclude at least from a city point of view that the fog water is would be safe to drink or to use for irrigation irrigation and aquaculture the not just your fresh water usage on the plant we still have full can help in a small scale in regions not chile but how could it impact the larger agricultural picture around the wound in agriculture for instance theres people who are currently looking at can we water intelligently now the words can we choose to water when the crops reach a certain level of dryness rather than just watering on some sort of a schedule. Fog. And augment water availability during the otherwise dry time of year and offset water stress on the strawberry farm in californias Central Coast to sarah but just this is scientific come to find the balance between folk and it would essentially knowing more about fall could actually change the way we. Yes it changes the physical environment important words that reduce whats called bappa transpiration about a transpiration is the loss of water from the surface to the atmosphere from soil and plants on days like today evapotranspiration is really if the plants arent demanding as much water you dont need to irrigate as much this sounds like common sense but collecting the data to formulate an eye watering strategy is being done fast time theres a big gap right now between the information that this research is general and farming practices this research is the first to address how coastal fog events impacts about the transpiration raids and the crop function. Begins with a series of scientific instruments measuring pongs at ground level these are some of the instruments we use to measure exchange of carbon and water and energy between the atmosphere and the surface is there a particular reason why this instrument lies in this particular spot this is an ideal location actually to really understand coastal fog influence on ecosystem level carbon and water balance because as we can see its a pretty high margin this landscape vegetative. Really theres not a lot of Noise Associated with the effects of different species or topography on these changes and concentration we can really only understand the effect of cousteau fog on field scale carbon in Water Exchange what is this device here is my hand on no its ok so this is whats called a white person four hundred its a portable photosynthesis system and this instrument allows us to take the pulse of plants at the level of the leaf when we clamp this instrument onto a leaf which youre welcome to do we can measure how much leaf it is photosynthesizing and transpiring is how much carbon its taking up and how much waters. So why dont you clamp on it yeah. Go ahead and clamp all the way and hold that theyre serving right now in your applying. And whats called still model thats the degree to which. In. More youre the number more. And that means that there are more water or loss is this data telling me i role this is really the heart of the project we want to have mechanistic understanding of how these crops respond to their own and so the data that ive been collecting using this instrument tells us that plants dont lose as much water on foggy days compared to sunny days so theres a significant reduction in water loss from plants on foggy days i have to say that sounds very intuitive you know you would expect them not to need so much water when its fogy so why is your with such sorrow impactful. This is the first time that weve been quantifying it and understanding what the effect is on fog and being able to compare and contrast the response of products to different environmental conditions if this instrumentation could be used in a variety of different ecosystems and agricultural systems around the world wed have a much better understanding of how local climate affects water to more from farms and has much greater potential to confidently make informed decisions about how much water to apply in agriculture producing irrigation amounts and by folk and of the farming regions is yet another small step in addressing water scarcity from fog farm fields and deserts around the world to next piece of hotel in Los Angeles California the quest to address water scarcity through science and technology continues here with more on that pos of the story is techniques coast a dramatic the hilton hotel in Universal City california is no stranger to doing laundry every room uses twenty five gallons of water a day to keep the sheets clean however thanks to some new technology all that has changed but need the bustle of this a massive hotel inventor Steve Jenkins the chief Technology Officer of zeros a london based company is making a dent in a world thirsting for more of one of its most fragile resources water at the moment whats happening is things are telling right in the drama just being sprayed with water yeah detergent so far this cirrus machine looks like any ordinary commercial washer but then comes the water saving innovation were showing them a lot so were going to put this three step in to spread the detergent i think. And then the beads are going to come in and do that with polymer beads around one point five million of them taking the place of water in the washer these beads act like tiny sponges power. Ending soaking up in carrying away dirt and stains from fabrics so once the beans about you drop dead the stock tumbling and then there are holes in the drum wall on the beach watching go through that hole down back because back then that holds back on. All the beach go in and some of the major polls around just to keep it topped up as we go in the wash cycle the last water used in the commercial washing machine of the sun typically eighty percent so in an hour cycle same way using one hundred fifteen someone one by liters of water and thats really low for a twenty five milligram wash no really want to you know typically youd be five hundred liters or even more in the not machine settling down so were saving a lot of water on what coals im washing mellowness detergents are really sustainable. A simple chemistry demonstration offers a close up look at how the polymer beads work their new from gene this is blue dye its a solution in water yeah its moderately warm its only just above Room Temperature but you can see that about six that die that we made went about by the abuse rather than we make those jeans that youre wearing there ok and this is the beads that were going to test on these beads basically slightly bigger you can see them but if you count on that also the next generation of beads that were working on would be s. F. These are going to replace those with these are going to move and replace those beams ok so if i just. Fill this up with this little reflection were going to put this lid on here so we dont want to cope with it ok and then i need a happy volunteer he will shave hes going to shake up for about two minutes just to say so whats happening in the now is those feet have chemistry in them as well as the problems theres more chemistry in that which is actually starting to exalt the dye in the system on the beach will gradually tend to blow up on the wall so what she says clearest and it will take about two minutes from now starting looks great. First of its so youre seeing some. Civility some haziness and thats just from the action of the shaking of the thing that will settle down after the color change is informed of basically being a washing machine and you are being a washing machine. So what makes these what makes is the second version so the size of the shapes different from the density slightly different stuff to help us get more the beads out of the washer to. Get more mechanical action into the water show that no mass to the feed fewer beats obviously because we dont want to force the volume the same volume of machines for the sport of golf you would be ok so we started out with. This color. Deep. And this is what we have looked so. Well so so you can see color protection effect. And you can also see. The effect on the beads just suck sucked it all up correct could you use a mix of beads that are tuned for each individual color you can and you can put different chemistries in the different bodies a complicated solution but its technically possible unlike water that is used in commercial and home washing machines and later discarded when the polymer beads have reached their full life cycle after hundreds of uses theyre not just dumped into local landfills amounts to taken those beads away because we dont throw them away we we have to clean them up and we can potentially reuse them in the system or if theyre beyond that we can recycle them into other applications but it just melted down they could be melted down a process just like plastics in this family anyway and made a good thing these machines are catching on in north america in the u. K. With hundreds of models up and running but the biggest consumers at the moment are hotels this machine and hes saying. You know that two thousand a year was about a lot of space a low low low energy the chemical and the benefit of the physical directly i knew it would be. A Technological Advancement the not only saves money but more importantly is having a quantifiable impact on conserving fresh water through innovation just one more small but important step in scientific efforts to help mitigate water scarcity around the world. Thats all for today join us for more science and innovation from around the wilds next time on technology. Show the ingredients that bring smiles but its also the number one culprit in a Global Health crisis cardiovascular disease thats our number one killer already posi the hardest part is just to say we think oh crap is bad but there is that all the same if we prove that sugar increases risk factors this is a problem techno i bestow on all disease. Discover a wealth of Award Winning programming from around the globe. 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