Related topics: water · pollution

Microbots can clean up polluted water

(Phys.org)—A new study shows that a swarm of hundreds of thousands of tiny microbots, each smaller than the width of a human hair, can be deployed into industrial wastewater to absorb and remove toxic heavy metals. The ...

World's first magnetic soap produced

Scientists from the University of Bristol have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. The soap's magnetic properties were proved with neutrons ...

Mercury helps to detail Earth's most massive extinction event

The Latest Permian Mass Extinction (LPME) was the largest extinction in Earth's history to date, killing between 80–90% of life on the planet, though finding definitive evidence for what caused the dramatic changes in climate ...

Bacteria produce gold by digesting toxic metals

High concentrations of heavy metals, like copper and gold, are toxic for most living creatures. This is not the case for the bacterium C. metallidurans, which has found a way to extract valuable trace elements from a compound ...

Researcher uses bacteria to make radioactive metals inert

The Lost Orphan Mine below the Grand Canyon hasn't produced uranium since the 1960s, but radioactive residue still contaminates the area. Cleaning the region takes an expensive process that is only done in extreme cases, ...

page 1 from 40

Heavy metal (chemistry)

A heavy metal is a member of an ill-defined subset of elements that exhibit metallic properties, which would mainly include the transition metals, some metalloids, lanthanides, and actinides. Many different definitions have been proposed—some based on density, some on atomic number or atomic weight, and some on chemical properties or toxicity. The term heavy metal has been called "meaningless and misleading" in an IUPAC technical report due to the contradictory definitions and its lack of a "coherent scientific basis". There is an alternative term toxic metal, for which no consensus of exact definition exists either. As discussed below, depending on context, heavy metal can include elements lighter than carbon and can exclude some of the heaviest metals. Heavy metals occur naturally in the ecosystem with large variations in concentration. Nowadays anthropogenic sources of heavy metals, i.e. pollution, have been introduced to the ecosystem. Waste derived fuels are especially prone to contain heavy metals so they should be a central concern in a consideration of their use.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA