Last night, Dean Kamen, the inventor of Segway was on the Colbert Report. He brought with him a magic black box turning any waste water into pure clean water. And he proposed that he can use this box in the third world countries to save millions of people from water borne diseases. As funnily skeptical as Colbert, he dumped a bag of salty jalapeño flavored Doritos into the waste water to see if it comes out the other end clean.
I searched on the web to look for how this contraption works and more importantly if it's a practical device for the poor countries. It turns out that it was invented in 2003, and it's a low energy water distiller. It can use any sort of heat source and costing about 1000 watts to distill 10 gallons of water per hour. The key invention is to trap the heat when water re-condenses and recycle that heat to boil more water.
It's much more mundane than the magic black box I thought it was.
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