A “book” containing pull-out pages that can save lives by making polluted water drinkable has been developed by scientists.
Each page of The Drinkable Book is impregnated with bacteria-killing silver and copper nanoparticles. In tests conducted in Africa, it made water contaminated with raw sewage as safe as North American tap water.
Designer Dr Theresa Dankovitch, from Carnegie Mellon University in the US, said: “In Africa, we wanted to see if the filters would work on ‘real water’, not water purposely contaminated in the lab… We can achieve 99.9% purity with our silver and copper nanoparticle paper, bringing bacteria levels comparable to those of US drinking water.
Each page can be removed and slid into a special holding device through which water is poured and filtered. One page of the book can clean up to 26 gallons of drinking water.
TV influencing career choices
Forget career advisers and parents – these days television shows such as The Apprentice and celebrity chefs have more impact over the type of jobs we choose.
Lord Alan Sugar’s BBC reality show, in which he whittles down budding businessmen and women to be his next protege, came top of the most influential programmes in inspiring Britons to be an entrepreneur.
BBC’s crime drama Silent Witness, starring Amanda Burton as female pathologist Professor Sam Ryan, took second place in spurring people to take up a career as a pathologist, with MasterChef and Art Attack also highly rated influences. The survey was carried out for reed.co.uk.
Best Scots pipe band in a decade
A pipe band from Scotland has been named world champions for the first time in a decade.
Shotts and Dykehead Caledonia were named the World Pipe Band Champions for 2015 at the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow.
They are the first world champions from Scotland since 2005.
Feline fanatics at cats convention
A city mayor threw out a ceremonial ball of yarn to mark the opening of an annual festival for cat videos that drew thousands of feline fanatics to a baseball stadium.
Chris Coleman said 13,000 people were at CHS Field in St Paul, Minnesota, for the fourth Internet Cat Video Festival.
Videos played on the stadium’s large scoreboard as people watched from the stands and on blankets in the outfield. Selections included clips of a cat startling a bear and a scene from Jurassic Park edited to include giant cats.
Wrongly held for three years
An unlucky prison inmate in Mexico was wrongly held for nearly three years extra because of a bureaucratic mix-up, the National Human Rights Commission said.
The inmate completed his sentence in 2010 but authorities at two federal prisons lost track of his records and he remained in custody for another two years, nine months and 19 days. He filed a human rights complaint in 2013 and was finally released from Islas Marias prison, a Pacific island penal colony off the coast of Nayarit state.
The commission called the inmate’s treatment a “violation of human rights to liberty and personal integrity”, and recommended changes to avoid similar mistakes in future.
No new sweetcorn-eating record
Corn-on-the-cob-consuming contestants have failed to break the sweetcorn eating world record despite their “valiant efforts” in the UK championships.
Scott Powell, 28, from Castleford, West Yorkshire, was crowned corn-eating champion after finishing 10 cobs in 12 minutes at the event at York Maze.
But he could not beat the world record of 46 ears of corn set by American Jammin’ Joe LaRue in 2010.