WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2010-09-21 Time: 05:00:01 Posted By: News Poster
By Tamar Kahn
Johannesburg – SOUTH African tap water is swimming with bugs, laden with pesticide residues and peppered with heavy metals.
So says Prof Eugene Cloete, dean of science at the University of Stellenbosch, who has fitted filters to the taps in his home and offers visitors to his office bottled mineral water.
He doesn’t think much of our rivers and streams either, polluted as they are by industry, farming and poorly treated sewage. For the communities who depend on these dodgy water sources, he has now invented a cheap, disposable filter the size of a tea bag that fits into the neck of a bottle and purifies the water as it is poured out into a cup.
It strips out disease-carrying bacteria, pesticides, heavy metals, and even the nasty taste of chlorine, all for just a few cents. His invention is not yet in commercial production, but has already elicited inquiries from across the globe, from philanthropists, aid organisations, retailers, and companies selling hiking and camping gear.
Cloete says he is stunned by the response, but he shouldn’t be: 1,2-billion people around the world do not have access to potable water. Three hundred million of them are in Africa. An estimated 1000 people die daily from water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid, he says.
A microbiologist by training, Cloete is an inventor at heart, with nine patents to his name. His first, devised when he was just 23, stops fungi from growing in jet fuel and clogging up the pipes and filters.
It is still making money for Chemical Services, the company he worked for when he came up with the idea.
Creativity, he maintains, is a skill that can be taught.
“It’s like reading and writing. The more you use it, the better you get,” he says.
He employs five methods he uses to encourage people to think differently.
First of all, one can try to think about the “shape, size and boundaries” for products.
“Think of juice boxes: companies used to only make 2l ones, then they introduced 200ml ones and they became a lunchbox product.”
Then there is “design thinking”, where one finds a solution that is designed around the problem – such as hiding a hole in the wall with a strategically placed picture.
“Lateral thinking” means asking “what else can I use this for? Often a problem in one area is a solution in another: for example, slime is a problem in waste-water plants, but you can also use it to remove nutrients.”
“Conceptual thinking” involves looking at a novel way to use an existing product, such as a paperclip, and then playing around with the verb that describes this use. “You could use a paperclip to hang biltong on. Then if you think of other things you could hang on it, you multiply the applications … with our filter we could start thinking of putting other things through it, such as milk.”
Last of all, there is “provocative thinking”, which “teases the mind”, he says, suggesting universities without exams, or schools without classrooms. (Not perhaps the best example for SA, where tree schools are hardly renowned for their success in getting students through matric).
He constantly mulls over ways to tackle everyday problems. He has designed his garden to allow his two “pavement special” dogs freedom to roam without wrecking his flowers (he observed their favourite routes and placed his plants accordingly), and he thinks nothing of pinching the chrome from a picture frame to make up an impossible-to-buy spare part for his vintage car.
That kind of low-tech improvisation meets hi-tech sophistication seems to be a common motif among gadget makers, and the story of his tea bag water filter is no exception.
In this case, cutting-edge nanotechnology collided with a lowly pair of hair tongs and a tea bag filched from the science faculty boardroom.
He got the idea for his latest patent during a science faculty tour when he joined last year.
Cloete, who describes himself as an expert on slime (and ways to get rid of it), was already working on ways to use enzymes to break down the gunge that builds up on wet surfaces. Slime, the by-product of bacterial activity, is a huge problem in industry. It accumulates in water pipes, on filters, in tanks and pools, and scientists are constantly hunting for new and better ways to inhibit its growth.
Cloete and his former students at the University of Pretoria had been investigating the slime-inhibiting potential of membranes that had been washed with protease and amylase enzymes.
As he watched a Stellenbosch student demonstrating how to spin nanofibres, filaments finer than a human hair, Cloete had one of those “aha” moments.
“I thought to myself, it would not be a bad idea to make our own membranes from nanofibres instead of purchasing a filter. And why not incorporate the enzymes into the fibres themselves?”
He didn’t have any enzymes handy, but he did have a bottle of a commercial biocide lying about his office.
So he set two post-doctoral students, Marelize Botes and Michele de Kwaadsteniet, to work on the project, and sure enough, they managed to incorporate the chemical into nanofibres, which they spun into a mesh on the surface of commercial water filters. When bacteria-laden water was poured on to these filters, the super-fine nanofibre mesh provided a physical barrier to stop them passing through and the biocide killed them off. His next brain wave was to stick two of these filters coated with biocide- impregnated nanofibres together, and fill the sachet with activated carbon, which removes nasties like heavy metals.
Initially, the water filter was rolled up like a cigar, and capable of filtering 15l of water. But the scientists realised this posed a problem: how would users know when it was time to change the filter?
The researchers initially considered using a calcium carbonate pill as an indicator, which would gradually dissolve over the life of the filter: when it had disappeared it would be time to change the filter.
Then they realised that a far simpler approach would be to make the filter disposable.
In the science faculty boardroom, Cloete found the perfect design: a tea bag.
Once the researchers had removed the tea, and spun nanofibres onto its sachet, the next challenge was finding a way to stick it back together – and that’s where the hairdressing tools came in.
It turns out that tea bags are sealed with heat, and one of his students just happened to have a pair of tongs for straightening her hair on hand.
“People are used to using tea bags only once and then disposing of them straight away. There’s no psychological barrier with this kind of product,” says Cloete , who surprisingly says he’s done no work testing the acceptability of his product in communities without safe drinking water.
The assumption seems to be that people who need clean water will be only too grateful for some technological assistance. If the global response to his product, which since its launch in late July has seen hundreds of media reports, is anything to go by, that assumption is spot on.
Original Source: 
Original date published: 20 September 2010
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201009201394.html?viewall=1