Solar Drinking Water, Forgetting Memories, Super-Earth

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Self-improvement, Science, Astronomy, Education

4.6 • 935 Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, you’ll learn about a revolutionary new system that can turn saltwater into drinking water with the help of the sun, how your brain chooses what memories to keep, and a super-Earth with a really dark side.

Solar Drinking Water

“Solar-powered technology converts saltwater into drinking water emission-free.” King’s College London. 2024.
“Flexible batch electrodialysis for low-cost solar-powered brackish water desalination.” by Wei He, et al. 2024.
“Valuing Water.” United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 2021.

Forgetting Memories

“How the brain chooses which memories are important enough to save and which to let fade away.” by Linda Carroll. 2024.
“Relax! It’ll boost your memory, study shows.” by Kate Kelland. 2010.
“Normal and Abnormal Sharp Wave Ripples in the Hippocampal-Entohinal Cortex System: Implications for Memory Consolidation, Alzheimer’s Disease, and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.” by Zhi-Hang Zhen, et al. 2021.

Super-Earth

“This super-Earth is the first planet confirmed to have a permanent dark side.” by Joseph Howlett. 2024.
“LHS 3844 b.” NASA Exoplanet Catalog. N.d.
“Tidal Locking.” NASA. 2024.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Curiosity Daily from Discovery where you can get smarter in just a few minutes.
0:09.2	I am Nate.
0:10.2	Hey everyone, I'm Callie.
0:11.6	We're so excited to have you here with us at Curiosity, and if you're a loyal listener, welcome back.
0:16.0	Today you'll learn about a revolutionary new system that can turn salt water into drinking water with the help of the sun,
0:22.0	how your brain chooses which memories to keep, and a
0:26.1	super earth with a really dark side.
0:29.2	Ooh, I'm excited about these stories today.
0:31.9	By some accounts, roughly a quarter of all humans on the
0:34.5	planet face extremely high levels of water stress which leads to severe water
0:39.1	scarcity. In some rural areas in the developing world up to 1.6 billion people that's
0:44.7	billion with a bee grapple with this scarcity and in a lot of cases the
0:49.2	groundwater they rely on just isn't cutting it. It's either dirty, salty, or both.
0:55.0	Oof, okay, we've talked about this a lot in the past because it's a problem that we really have no other
1:00.0	choice but to solve. It seems like desalination could be a solution, but I know most of the ways to get salt out of salt water are super
1:07.8	energy dependent like they just aren't practical.
1:10.8	Well not so fast. Researchers from Kings College in London, MIT and the
1:16.2	Hemholtz Institute for Renewable Energy Systems have developed what they think
1:20.4	could revolutionize the desalination process and it gets its power from the sun.
1:25.6	Aren't there already some solar-powered options? So yes, but there are problems. The first is that you can use solar power to power anything, but most
1:35.0	desalination methods would need just an astronomical amount of solar power to
1:40.4	suck the salt out of the water. And that means that most methods aren't cheap either.
	...

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