Skip to Content

Nullifying Nitrates

Steer clear of nitrates. These nasty waste compounds generated by the industrial use of nitric acid can cause blue baby syndrome in healthy infants or turn a healthy lake into a putrid marsh. Current methods for removing nitrate wastes from ground-water are energy-intensive, expensive, and not always effective. To improve this picture, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are testing an inexpensive process for converting solid and liquid nitrate wastes into harmless nitrogen gas. Wastewater is pumped through a chamber containing a re-usable metallic catalyst and an acid. The catalyst strips away the oxygen atoms from the nitrates, yielding nitrate-free wastewater and nitrogen gas. Los Alamos is testing the process on 10 different kinds of nitrates and has been inundated with calls from interested mining, chemical, farming and nuclear-power companies.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.