![]() Bacteria can make arsenic insoluble, so depositing them in the wells could ensure that the arsenic isn't in the water people drink. The researchers used X-ray microfocus spectroscopy to look at arsenic before and after it has been treated by the bacteria. In 2002, the World Health Organization estimated that about 13 million people in the USA were drinking arsenic-tainted water, as well as people in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, Mexico, Taiwan (Province of China), Thailand, Viet Nam, and Bengal.Ī group of researchers from Manchester used Diamond to investigate ways of using bacteria to deal with arsenic contamination. It wasn't until 1993 that we discovered this "clean" well water contained dangerous quantities of arsenic, resulting in the largest mass poisoning of a population in history.īangladesh isn't the only country with this problem. The intention was to give the Bangladeshi people a safe source of drinking water, free from the bacteria that cause diarrhoea and other intestinal diseases that were plaguing the country. In the 1970s, between 7-11 million deep wells were dug throughout Bangladesh. In the future, we may be able to use these metal-munching earthworms to help us clean up contaminated soils. The research suggested that ingesting the metals triggers the production of a special protein, which essentially wraps around the metal and makes it non-toxic to the earthworm. They found that earthworms take the metals in and change the form of the metals to make them less toxic. How do they cope with the metals? Mark's team used Diamond to investigate the form of the metals in the soil, and after the worms had eaten them. They were looking at an old lead mining site in Wales where the primary contaminant is lead, one in the Pennine ore field that is contaminated by lead and zinc, and a third in the South West where there is lots of arsenic and copper.īut if you dig into the soil at those sites, you still find earthworms. Former mining sites from the 19th century have high levels of metals in the soil, and plants don't grow well. Mark Hodson from the University of Reading talked to Diamond about his research into earthworms in contaminated soils. Read more on page 16 of Inside Diamond here. Weyl fermions can carry electrical charge much faster than electrons in ordinary materials, which could make them useful for next-generation computing technologies. It was hailed as the physics breakthrough of the year 2015 by the Institute of Physics and others. American and Chinese researchers achieved the same result. A UK group of scientists, led by Yulin Chen, using ARPES on Diamond’s I05 beamline discovered a feature that showed the presence of the elusive Weyl fermion. When modern researchers investigated the properties of some curious crystals made from a combination of the elements tellurium and arsenic, known as tellurium arsenide, they found that its crystals lack a special point called an inversion centre. Researchers kept looking for it, but it consistently failed to show up in experiments, and so gradually slipped into obscurity. ![]() In 1929, German mathematician Hermann Weyl predicted the existence of the Weyl fermion, a new subatomic particle. ![]()
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