Thursday random water links

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1. Researchers at Rice claim to have created efficient means to producing hydrogen from sunlight and water

This sort of catalysis isn’t new, but the lab packaged a perovskite layer and the electrodes into a single module that, when dropped into water and placed in sunlight, produces hydrogen with no further input.

Summary article here. Paper in ACS Nano, here.

2. More hype on water harvesting from air

Michael Mirilashvili wants to deliver hundreds of generators that produce drinking water out of thin air. His company, Watergen, sent a machine to a Gaza hospital last week in a rare case of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in the Hamas-ruled enclave.

Article in Yahoo News, here. There has been a lot of media hype on air moisture harvesting recently. I’d like to see a rigorous academic study on the efficiencies, costs, etc. Is this really a viable water supply technology for poor, drought-stricken regions?

3. Cloud seeding in North Korea

After years of devastating droughts that led to food shortages in North Korea, scientists in the Hermit Kingdom reportedly started developing artificial rain to combat the problem… On Wednesday, a report by South Korean news outlet NK Economy said that scientists at North Korea’s Kim Il Sung University have been developing such artificial rainfall for years to fight drought.

Article in Fox News.

As noted in this post from a few weeks back, the effectiveness of cloud seeding is seemly still poorly understood.