The Pollution Magnet

Eighty-two thousand people die from cancer in Bangladesh every year, many due to arsenic poisoning. Building upon her discovery of a way to get rust nanoparticles to bind to arsenic, Dr. Vicki Colvin has invented a new, astonishingly easy way to clean the water supply: Sauté a teaspoon of rust in a mixture of oil and lye, which breaks down the rust into nano-sized pieces. Retrieve the rust particles with a household magnet. Then immerse the rust-covered magnet into a pot of contaminated water. Pull out the arsenic. The system is up to a hundred times more efficient than existing methods, and requires no electricity or manufacturing infrastructure, so even the poorest of villagers can use it.

Colvin, a professor of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice University, has big plans. She sees her method as just the first step toward developing an easy point-of-use water-purification system that would cover virtually every pollutant. The filter would have a dipstick to tell you what's in the water and a reader to tell you what you need to add to pull it out -- perhaps silver nanoparticles to kill bacteria or a protein to capture pesticides.

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