| A Cheaper Way to Clean Water and In-Store Signs Get Smart |
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Low sodium: Jacob Roy, an employee at desalination startup Oasys Water, takes measurements at a new development facility in Boston.Credit: Robert McGinnisOasys Water says it will test complete, large-scale systems using forward osmosis early next year.Oasys Water, a company that has been developing a novel, inexpensive desalination technology, showed off a new development facility in Boston this week. The company, which has been demonstrating commercial-scale components of its system in recent months, plans to begin testing a complete system early next year and to start selling the systems by the end of 2011.Currently, desalination is done mainly in one of two ways: water is either heated until it evaporates (called a thermal process) or forced through a membrane that allows water molecules but not salt ions to pass (known as reverse osmosis). [Read the full article] Mapping the net: Modeling software sketches out a communications network, with lines color-coded according to how much traffic they're carrying. Credit: OPNETUnderstanding where wireless bandwidth demand will come from can keep communication systems from overloading.In September, when the University of Alabama football team took on San Jose State, more than 100,000 fans packed the stadium and watched the Crimson Tide wash over the Spartans, 48 to 3. After the game, cell-phone customers flooded AT&T and the Tuscaloosa News with complaints of dropped calls, missing text messages, and an inability to connect to the network, not only at the arena but across the city.Bandwidth logjams have suddenly made it more urgent to come up with better ways of modeling and dealing with future traffic growth so that networks don't experience total meltdowns. [Read the full article] Biological sutures: Hair-thin threads seeded with stem cells (marked in red and blue) could help heal the heart.Credit: Gaudette Lab, WPIOver the last decade, scientists have experimented with using stem cells to heal or replace the scarred tissue that mars the heart after a heart attack. While the cells do spur some level of repair in animals, human tests have resulted in modest or transient benefits at best. Now researchers have developed a new kind of biological sutures, made from polymer strands infused with stem cells, that might help surmount two major obstacles to using stem cells to heal the heart: getting the cells to the right spot and keeping them there long enough to trigger healing. [Read the full article] 
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