Friday, May 10, 2019

Gee, this feels familiar...

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The Register:
Techie with outdated documentation gets his step count in searching for non-existent cabinet
By Team Register. 10 May 2019 at 07:03

5-minute job? We've heard that old chestnut before

Have you got that Friday feeling? El Reg does, mainly because we're bringing you the latest instalment of On Call.

Every week, we trawl through emails recounting the times readers have been faced with a particularly tricky call-out, searching for the best one to take you into the weekend.

This time, we meet "Wayne", who got rather more exercise than he'd bargained for when asked to do a "five-minute" extra job after finishing an upgrade to a pair of network routers. ...

You definitely need to click through the article's link and read the whole story.

And remember it the next time I say I'm coming home late from work because I needed to fix "one last bug before leaving the office".

Thursday, May 09, 2019

ECN Magazine: Radical Desalination Approach May Disrupt the Water Industry

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Radical Desalination Approach May Disrupt the Water Industry
Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science - Tue, 05/07/2019 - 1:50pm

Hypersaline brines—water that contains high concentrations of dissolved salts and whose saline levels are higher than ocean water—are a growing environmental concern around the world. Very challenging and costly to treat, they result from water produced during oil and gas production, inland desalination concentrate, landfill leachate (a major problem for municipal solid waste landfills), flue gas desulfurization wastewater from fossil-fuel power plants, and effluent from industrial processes.
...
A Columbia Engineering team led by Ngai Yin Yip, assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering, reports that they have developed a radically different desalination approach—"temperature swing solvent extraction (TSSE)"—for hypersaline brines. The study, published online in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, demonstrates that TSSE can desalinate very high-salinity brines, up to seven times the concentration of seawater. This is a good deal more than reverse osmosis, the gold-standard for , and can hold handle approximately twice seawater salt concentrations.

This is incredible news. Now that we have seen the process in a lab, hopefully it can be scaled up for use in a commercial desalinization plant. A cheap and low-energy technology would pretty much solve the world's fresh water supply problems.