Cooper Fochler on the Scene for News 8

Getting the salt out

Sid Perkins

WEB

December 8th, 2015

If you have ever drank the water from the ocean it probably didn’t taste good and that’s because of the salt in the ocean. In the next couple of years you might be drinking the water that came from the ocean. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) in Cambridge, Martin Bazant and his team are working to zap the salt out of salt water. They made these pipes that have little tiny holes in them. Then, they made a substance of little glass particles and push them together to make a firm object. After that, they put that firm object between a positive and negative electrode and then they send an electric current through it and that will zap the salt out of the water. This system runs non-stop. There have been some scientists that have come close to figuring this out but it was way too costly and used way too much energy so Bazant found a way to make it use less energy and not such a fortune.

I choose this article because it looked like it had a lot of good truthful information. What grabbed my attention was when I first read that they zap the salt out of the salt water I was in disbelief and that made me want to read and learn about how they do it. I found this article on a website called science News for Students, when I was looking for a good topic this one really caught my attention and it made me want to read about it. I learned that  the ocean holds 97 percent of the Earth's water and that water is all salt water and is undrinkable, I also learned how they zap the salt out of the salt water that was one of the big questions I had, the last thing I learned was that other people have been trying to find a solution on how to get the salt out of the salt water for a while and none of them worked but this was the first guaranteed answer. I can agree and disagree with the author and scientist, I agree with the author that this is definitely something important and shouldn’t not be written about, I can also agree with the scientist in a way that more people should be studying this to maybe find a way to use less energy and cost less, but I can disagree with the scientist that his way seems like it may be one of a kind because he perfectly made the pipes and who knows maybe he won’t be able to install these pipes the right way and it may cost the place a fortune to install this system. Our class just finished a unit on plants and I can remember that there are three thing that all plant need to survive a good environment: water, sun, anchor. Water makes up 60 percent of the average human body so it is the most needed nutrient for humans as well. This is affecting scientists because maybe this makes them want to study this more to find a smarter and faster way to do it. This theory started in between the california drought when they had close to no fresh water someone thought of the idea to extract the salt out of the ocean water. I have three questions, who was the first person to think of this idea and what made them think of this, my last question is how long did it take to figure out this theory. I was very amazed that we have this kind of technology to be able to zap the salt out of salt water. This definitely seems like a very reliable source.

Works Cited

“Getting the Salt out.” Student Science. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Jan. 2016. <https://student.societyforscience.org/article/water-getting-salt-out>.