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A “Salty” Restaurant that Cleans Air
When we think of salt, we think of it as a seasoning. But for an Iranian restaurant group, salt was the main material for a new kind of eco-friendly building. The “Salt” Restaurant of Shiraz is located in the southern Iran, where the walls, tables and even the stairs were covered with a salty coating. To our surprise, this layer of salt helps clean the polluted air of the city. Inspired by local and naturally occurring salt caves of the region, the group wanted to create a design that reflected the area’s distinctive salt mines and Marharloo salt lake of Shiraz. They stated, “In this particular case, the walls, structural…
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How to purify your water
What is the best way you think to make your water clean? You may think that boiling is pretty much enough to kill all the bacteria. Well, you could just boil the water but this wouldn’t get the sand and other particles out of the water. So the best way purify your water is to use a filter. It gets the particles, dirt and some of other “unseen” chemicals out of your water. You can try homemade a simple water filter. Use an empty bottle and turn the bottle upside down (with the cap down down). Then fill in the bottle with the materials in this order: – pebbles – Sand…
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Activated Carbon and Air Filters
Activated carbon is carbon that has been treated with oxygen. After the treatment, millions of tiny pores are activated on the carbon’s surface. Amazingly, these pores are so numerous that a single pound of activated carbon may provide 60 to 150 acres of surface area to trap pollutants. Once carbon has been activated, it can remove a bunch of airborne chemicals, for example, alcohols, organic acids, aldehydes, sulfur dioxide, sulfuric acid, and phosgene. It also removes odours, whether they are from humans or animals. It also removes perfumes, other household cleaning chemicals, and is especially good at removing volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Activated Carbon and Filters The trick lies on…
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Water: Our Suffering Best Friend
I live along a lakeshore. For years, water has been my best companion. Its face changes moment to moment. Water is just a lady with a thousand faces. This spring, I saw a new face. In March, our neighbourhood experienced a very unpleasant smell and taste in the lake water. For days, its surface stayed still. Volvox algae was soon found out to be the source of problems. It is non-toxic, but meanwhile depletes lake oxygen as it dies off. The algae bloom tells us that our lake is processing a load of nutrients, which typically flow from human settlements. Our lake is a rural lake with forested park on…