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Water quality impacts by harmful algal blooms co-occur with anthropogenic chemicals and waste pollution. We need to embrace multidisciplinary approaches to advance the science and improve the practice of water quality assessment and management.
A DNA scavenger that can locate and destroy mobile genetic elements is demonstrated to be an effective way to reduce the horizontal transfer of antimicrobial resistance.
The electro-Fenton process offers great potential for the treatment of contaminated water, but its industrial applications are limited due to a lack of electrocatalysts with effective cycling functionality. The electro-responsive catalyst enables continuous cycling of Fe(III)/Fe(II) species for electro-driven regeneration of the Fe(II) catalyst, leading to stable and efficient degradation of organic pollutants.
Solar-powered hygroscopic gels adsorb moisture derived from crop transpiration and soil evaporation at night and release it back into soil under sunlight during the day via a facile device, enabling recycling of irrigation water in greenhouses.
Transforming waste sludge into valuable resources presents a promising solution for sludge management. The method of crafting single-atom catalysts by utilizing a range of elements in sludge illustrates its potential effectiveness in water purification.
Concurrent food and water insecurity doubled among children from 2005 to 2020, with minoritized children facing far more insecurity than their white counterparts.
Porous membranes struggle to achieve tight size exclusion. Membranes with uniform pore sizes and flow regimes that maximize interactions offer a path to unprecedented selectivity.
A digital method of studying the dynamic behaviours of marine and lake snows in the water column will help to speed up investigations of their behaviour and of the ecological impact of microplastics and microfibres in water bodies.
Organic photodetectors can be an alternative to silicon ones in detecting water contaminants, but their noise is too high due to disorder. Using pre-formed crystalline organic colloids to reduce the disorder in organic photodiodes helps to improve their performance to achieve detection of contaminants even at low concentrations.
Detailed modelling elucidates how increased vegetation water use in a warmer climate will reduce groundwater recharge, storage and subsequent exfiltration to further exacerbate declines in Colorado mountain headwater streamflow.
Complete defluorination of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) by a non-thermal technology is not easy to achieve. A rationally designed photochemical–electrochemical treatment train realizes complete defluorination of PFAS mixtures in complex water matrices.
Proton transfer time-of-flight mass spectrometry offers a new analytical tool to measure aqueous concentrations of volatile analytes in real time by the approach of headspace sampling, holding significant promise for advancing understanding of water chlorination chemistry.
A membrane inspired by the arsenic–protein interactions in biological systems allows the efficient removal of various arsenic species from contaminated water.
An innovative approach for a portable water bottle utilizes walking-induced electrostatic charges to achieve highly efficient in-situ disinfection, providing a practical solution for ensuring clean water in decentralized environments.
The use of widely available groundwater and remote sensing data allows the identification of depth to groundwater thresholds to maintain water-dependent vegetation health.
An absence of precipitation combined with drying of the ground through evaporation can deplete fresh water crucial for societies and ecosystems. However, new research highlights a more remote driver of drought.
Irrigation has helped facilitate large gains in crop yields but comes at an increasing cost to water resources, complicating climate change adaptation.
