Viable solution to clean drinking water in developing world

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The whole Russian Communism thing is a gray area to me. While de facto Communist, de jure I would count the Stalin period as neither right nor left wing. Stalin was using atheism to wrest the hearts and minds of the Russian people away from the Orthodox Church. When the 'Great Patriotic War' began (what we know as WW2), after some time Stalin relaxed his repression on the church and in fact encouraged it because he became aware that the population needed it. During the war you see many Tsarist army medals revived and etc. So he was really an opportunist, in terms of his politics.
Another reason I would wager to say that Russian Communism fell has a lot to do with the period of time between the Revolution and the end of the Civil War. The Civil War lead to militarized types assuming positions of leadership in the party. The Civil War and the militarization of the Communist Party is what, I think, led directly to it's failure to create an 'ideal' Communist state

You simply refuse to recognize that a totalitarian collectivist state is in direct contradiction with our egotistical nature. That is why it will always fail. Humans have egos. Humans prefer their children to the children of others. It is an evolutionary survival characteristic. It is the outcome of millions of years of Darwinian natural selection. Forget about collectivism and altruism. They never have worked in the entire existence of our species and they never will.

ruveyn

When? During their feudal period in our 15 and 16th century. After the Meji restoration Japan went Gung Ho on modernization. That included a money society. You hit the target right. A cashless economy is a primitive economy. And Japan did not have mass production before the modernization. Why? They did not have the machines and the power sources. They needed steel AND steam. Prior to the modernization their steel went into making Samuri swards. After modernization their steel went into making rails for the railways.

ruveyn

My proposal is to have the people of the developing world stop p*ssing and sh*ting in the bodies of water that are used as drinking water sources. Teach the Miserable of the Earth to dig proper latrines away from aquifers.

ruveyn

(PhysOrg.com) -- New nanomaterials research from the University at Buffalo could lead to new solutions for an age-old public health problem: how to separate bacteria from drinking water.

To the naked eye, both water molecules and germs are invisible -- objects so tiny they are measured by the nanometer, a unit of length about 100,000 times thinner than the width of a human hair.

But at the microscopic level, the two actually differ greatly in size. A single water molecule is less than a nanometer wide, while some of the most diminutive bacteria are a couple hundred.

Working with a special kind of polymer called a block copolymer, a UB research team has synthesized a new kind of nanomembrane containing pores about 55 nanometers in diameter -- large enough for water to slip through easily, but too small for bacteria.

The pore size is the largest anyone has achieved to date using block copolymers, which possess special properties that ensure pores will be evenly spaced, said Javid Rzayev, the UB chemist who led the study. The findings were published online on Jan. 31 in Nano Letters and will appear in the journal's print edition later this year, with UB chemistry graduate student Justin Bolton as lead author.

"These materials present new opportunities for use as filtration membranes," said Rzayev, an assistant professor of chemistry. "Commercial membranes have limitations as far as pore density or uniformity of the pore size. The membranes prepared from block copolymers have a very dense distribution of pores, and the pores are uniform."

"There's a lot of research in this area, but what our research team was able to accomplish is to expand the range of available pores to 50 nanometers in diameter, which was previously unattainable by block-copolymer-based methods," Rzayev continued. "Making pores bigger increases the flow of water, which will translate into cost and time savings. At the same time, 50 to 100 nm diameter pores are small enough not to allow any bacteria through. So, that is a sweet spot for this kind of application."

The new nanomembrane owes its special qualities to the polymers that scientists used to create it. Block copolymers are made up of two polymers that repel one another but are "stitched" together at one end to form the single copolymer.

When many block copolymers are mixed together, their mutual repulsion leads them to assemble in a regular, alternating pattern. The result of that process, called self-assembly, is a solid nanomembrane comprising two different kinds of polymers.

To create evenly spaced pores in the material, Rzayev and colleagues simply removed one of the polymers. The pores' relatively large size was due to the unique architecture of the original block copolymers, which were made from bottle-brush molecules that resemble round hair brushes, with molecular "bristles" protruding all the way around a molecular backbone.

I don't quite understand. I think that is sarcasm but at whose expense I am not sure.