Jordan and Israel agree on new border canal, desalination station

[browsing deer]

Israel and Jordan agree on building a new desalination plant in Eilat. the residual water is going to a new canal from Eilat to the dead sea.

There have been concerns that too much salt would reach the dead sea, and the canal would poison the land. On the other hand, no water reaches the soils anyway.
"
The two countries made their joint announcement Monday after a meeting between Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom and Jordanian Water and Irrigation Minister Hazim El-Nasser. The meeting was held on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea.

The canal will carry water from the Red Sea north to the Dead Sea, which has been steadily drying out. A fixed amount of canal water will be siphoned off and desalinated to supply drinking water to Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians, with the saline byproducts used to replenish the mineral-rich Dead Sea.

“Today we took an additional historic step to save the Dead Sea,” Shalom said Monday. “The joint international tender to be published tomorrow is proof of the cooperation between Israel and Jordan, and a response to those who cast doubt on whether the canal project would ever go ahead. This is an exceptional environmental and diplomatic achievement that testifies more than anything to the fertile cooperation between the countries.”
"

 

[waltky]

Caretaker PM appointed...

Jordan’s parliament dissolved, King Abdullah appoints caretaker PM
Tuesday 31st May, 2016 - Jordan’s King Abdullah on May 29 dissolved the parliament as its four-year term comes to an end and appointed veteran politician Hani Mulqi as the caretaker prime minister.

Reports stated that Mulqi has been put in charge of organising new elections by October. According to reports, the king accepted Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour’s resignation before he appointed Hani Mulqi for the caretaker prime minister’s post by royal decree. Constitutional rules state that elections must be held within four months. The king said, “Therefore, it is imperative to provide the Independent Elections Commission (IEC) with all the necessary support and facilitations. Such support is necessary to enable the agency to carry out its national duty of administering all stages of the electoral process with integrity and transparency.”

The king ordered the government to issue by-laws and instructions to implement the Decentralisation Law. According to reports, Mulqi and his team were asked by the king to carry out administrative reforms that can deepen the rule of law. The IEC said that the decision to hold elections is among King Abdullah’s authorities. Jihad Momani, the commission’s spokesperson said that the commissioners only need ten days to announce the date of election after the Royal Decree is issued.

Reports claim that Paragraph A of Article 73 of the Constitution states that “If the Chamber of Deputies is dissolved, a general election shall be held, and the new Chamber shall convene in an extraordinary session not later than four months from the date of dissolution.” King Abdullah praised the outgoing Prime Minister and said, “I have been closely watching, with appreciation, your and your colleagues’ performance… over the past years. The way you rose to the challenges and conditions experienced by the region, which left their impact on the country, was characterised with reason and realism.”

Jordan’s parliament dissolved King Abdullah appoints caretaker PM

 

[Roudy]

Israel and Jordan agree on building a new desalination plant in Eilat. the residual water is going to a new canal from Eilat to the dead sea.

There have been concerns that too much salt would reach the dead sea, and the canal would poison the land. On the other hand, no water reaches the soils anyway.
"
The two countries made their joint announcement Monday after a meeting between Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom and Jordanian Water and Irrigation Minister Hazim El-Nasser. The meeting was held on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea.

The canal will carry water from the Red Sea north to the Dead Sea, which has been steadily drying out. A fixed amount of canal water will be siphoned off and desalinated to supply drinking water to Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians, with the saline byproducts used to replenish the mineral-rich Dead Sea.

“Today we took an additional historic step to save the Dead Sea,” Shalom said Monday. “The joint international tender to be published tomorrow is proof of the cooperation between Israel and Jordan, and a response to those who cast doubt on whether the canal project would ever go ahead. This is an exceptional environmental and diplomatic achievement that testifies more than anything to the fertile cooperation between the countries.”
"

^^^^^^
What happens when you make peace with the Israelis as opposed to try to destroy them.

 

[waltky]

Alan Turing’s chemistry hypothesis can now be done, and it makes a great membrane...

Alan Turing’s chemistry hypothesis turned into a desalination filter
5/5/2018, A chemical reaction he suggested can now be done, and it makes a great membrane.

Alan Turing is rightly famed for his contributions to computer science. But one of his key concepts—an autonomous system that can generate complex behavior from a few simple rules—also has applications in unexpected places, like animal behavior. One area where Turing himself applied the concept is in chemistry, and he published a paper describing how a single chemical reaction could create complex patterns like stripes if certain conditions are met. It took us decades to figure out how to actually implement Turing's ideas about chemistry, but we've managed to create a number of reactions that display the behaviors he described. And now, a team of Chinese researchers has figured out how to use them to make something practical: a highly efficient desalination membrane.

From hypothesis to chemistry

Many chemical reactions end up going to completion, with all the possible reactants doing their thing and producing a product that's distributed uniformly within the reaction chamber. But under the right conditions, some chemical reactions don't reach equilibrium. These reactions are what interested Turing, since they could generate complex patterns. Turing's paper on the topic focused on a reaction that could be controlled by the addition of two chemicals: an activator that promotes it and an inhibitor that slows it down. If you simply mix the two into a reaction, the outcome will simply depend on the balance between these two chemicals. But as Turing showed, interesting things can happen if you diffuse them into a reaction from different locations. And if the two chemicals diffuse at different rates, you can get complex patterns or reaction products like spots or tiger stripes.

The authors' proposal for how the new membrane increases water purification rates.​

Turing's paper describing these reactions came out in 1952; it wasn't until the 1990s that someone actually figured out how to make this happen. Now, researchers may have discovered a way to put Turing's ideas to practical use. The use they focused on was the production of membranes used in desalination. We already know how to arrange chemical reactions to make very thin membranes with lots of pores by putting reactants in separate solvents that don't mix. That way, the membrane only forms at the interface between the water-based solution and the organic-based solution. While these membranes are highly effective, they typically face a trade-off: if you make a membrane so that water passes through more easily, you tend to allow more salt to pass through as well.

Stripes or dots?