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A new report from the U.N. suggests the world has not meet its goal of ensuring safe drinking water to the world's population by 2030.
联合国的一项新报告显示到2030年，世界将无法满足向全球人口保证安全饮用水的目标。
Not only that but the report suggests that by 2050 half the world's population may not have access to clean drinking water.
不仅如此，报告还显示到2050年，一半世界人口或无法饮用清洁水资源。
And while there's more than enough in the oceans, the trouble is removing the salt from it to make it drinkable.
而海洋资源极为丰富，但问题在于如何将海水中的盐分去除，让海水可以饮用。
But a Rice University project called the Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment program, or NEWT,
但莱斯大学的一个项目，名叫“纳米技术支持的水处理”项目，也被叫做“NEWT"，
has a way to easily and cheaply turn salt water into drinking water.
它可以简单，廉价地将海水变为饮用水。
What we're doing here at NEWT is try to provide water anywhere in the world where water is needed
我们在“NEWT"做的是试图向需要水的地方提供水资源，
and treat any source of water to the quality that is needed for the specific application.
并让水的质量达到特定用途所需的质量。
Desalination generally works one of two ways, by forcing water through small membranes that sift out the salt,
通常而言，脱盐有两种途径，第一是通过小隔膜过滤水，并过滤出盐分，
or by distilling the water by using heat to evaporate and condense the water leaving the salt and minerals behind.
第二是通过热量蒸发，将水浓缩，去除残留的盐和矿物质。
The problem is that both methods use so much energy that they're dirty and expensive.
问题是这两种方法都需要大量能量，而且肮脏和昂贵。
The conventional way of using membranes to distill water involves flowing hot dirty water on one side of the membrane and cold clean water on the other.
传统的用隔膜来脱盐的方法需要在隔膜的一侧注入流动的，脏脏的热水，另一边是冰冷的干净水。
And that temperature difference drives the process, and the problem with that is that you have to heat a lot of water,
整个流程是因为温差而起作用的，问题是你需要加热水，
a huge volume of water, all the water you want to purify has to be heated and that is an enormous energy cost.
这是很多水，所有你需要过滤的水都需要加热，这会产生高额的能源费。
But this new method uses a nanotechnology spray that turns the filtering membranes into heating elements, and it's powered by the sun.
但这种新方法使用纳米技术喷雾，将过滤膜变成发热元件，而且是用太阳来发电的。
So we're using solar, photo thermal processes which can be very localized, embed them in the membrane and shine light directly on the membrane.
我们使用太阳能，这种光热过程是局部的，并将它嵌入薄膜中，用光直接照射薄膜。
That way we don't have to heat all that water at all we only heat the water that's directly in contact with the membrane.
我们无需加热所有的水，我们只加热与薄膜接触的水。
It vaporizes and condenses on the other side and we make clean water.
它一边蒸发，一边浓缩，我们就得到了清洁水。
The result is perfectly clean, drinkable water at a fraction of the energy cost.
结果水很清洁，可以引用，而且能源费用很少。
One square meter of membrane can produce six liters of drinking water every hour.
一平方米的薄膜可以每小时产生六升饮用水。
The U.S. Department of Energy has invested $1.7 million into the new technology to all the team to do more research.
美国能源部向所有团队投资者了17万美金用于该新技术研发。
Kevin Enochs, VOA news
凯文·恩尼克斯，VOA新闻
