A new Netflix series has turned attention to a historic red-light district in Pakistan. Set in Lahore, “Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar” is one of the most popular non-English series on the streaming platform. But as VOA’s Pakistan bureau chief Sarah Zaman reports, not everyone is happy with the attention. Videographer: Wajid Asad; video editor: Malik Waqar Ahmed.
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Day: May 31, 2024
SYDNEY — Australian researchers say a simpler and cheaper method to remove salt from seawater using heat could help combat what they call “unprecedented global water shortages.” The desalination of seawater is a process where salt and impurities are removed to produce drinking water.
Most of the world’s desalination methods use a process called reverse osmosis. It uses pressure to force seawater through a membrane. The salt is retained on one side, and purified water is passed through on the other.
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) say that while widespread, the current processes need large amounts of electricity and other expensive materials that need to be serviced and maintained.
Scientists at ANU say they developed the world’s first thermal desalination method. It is powered not by electricity, but by moderate heat generated directly from sunlight, or waste heat from machines such as air conditioners or other industrial processes.
It uses a phenomenon called thermo diffusion, in which salt moves from hot temperatures to cold. The researchers pumped seawater through a narrow channel, which runs under a unit that was heated to greater than 60 degrees Celsius and over a bottom plate that was cooled to 20 degrees Celsius. Lower-salinity water comes from the water in the top section of the channel, closer to the heat.
After repeated cycles through the channels, the ANU study asserts, the salinity of seawater can be reduced from 30,000 parts per million to less than 500 parts per million.
Juan Felipe Torres, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the Australian National University and the project’s lead chief investigator, explained his pioneering work.
“We use a phenomenon people have not used before,” he said. “We are exploring its applicability in this context but in essence (it) should be something super simple, something as simple as a channel where you have water flowing through it and you are going to produce some sort of separation, and this is what thermal desalination is doing.”
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has stated that by 2025, 1.8 billion people around the world are likely to face “absolute water scarcity.”
Torres said the ANU’s invention could help ensure water supplies to communities under threat because of climate change.
“Our vision, let’s say, for the future to have a more equitable world in terms of water security and food security is a method that does not require expensive maintenance or to train personnel to continue running it. So, we think thermal desalination would enable that,” he said.
The ANU team is building a multi-channel solar-powered device to desalinate seawater in the Pacific kingdom of Tonga, which is enduring a severe drought.
The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.
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It’s an emergence that’s been more than a decade in the making. Trillions of cicadas that have burrowed underground for 13 or 17 years are now emerging in parts of the Midwestern and Southern United States. And, VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports, they are ready to mate.
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ACCRA, Ghana — Meet Ace-Liam Ankrah, a Ghana toddler who has set the record as the world’s youngest male artist.
His mother, Chantelle Kukua Eghan, says it all started by accident when her son, who at the time was 6 months old, discovered her acrylic paints.
Eghan, an artist and founder of Arts and Cocktails Studio, a bar that that offers painting lessons in Ghana’s capital, Accra, said she was looking for a way to keep her son busy while working on her own paintings.
“I spread out a canvas on the floor and added paint to it, and then in the process of crawling he ended up spreading all the colors on the canvas,” she said.
And that’s how his first artwork, “The Crawl,” was born, Eghan, 25, told The Associated Press.
After that and with his mother’s prodding, Ace-Liam kept on painting.
Eghan decided to apply for the record last June. In November, Guinness World Records told her that to break a previous record, her son needed to exhibit and sell paintings.
She arranged for Ace-Liam’s first exhibition at the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra in January, where nine out of 10 of his pieces listed were sold. She declined to say for how much the paintings sold.
They were on their way.
Then, Guinness World Records confirmed the record in a statement and last week declared that “at the age of 1 year 152 days, little Ace-Liam Nana Sam Ankrah from Ghana is the world’s youngest male artist.”
Guinness World Records did not immediately respond to an Associated Press query about the previous youngest male artist record holder.
The overall record for the world’s youngest artist is currently held by India’s Arushi Bhatnagar. She had her first exhibition at the age of 11 months and sold her first painting for 5,000 rupees ($60) in 2003.
These days, Ace-Liam, who will be 2 years old in July, still loves painting and eagerly accompanies his mom to her studio, where a corner has been set off just for him. He sometimes paints in just five-minute sessions, returning to the same canvas over days of weeks, Eghan says.
On a recent day, he ran excitedly around the studio, with bursts of energy typical for boys his age. But he was also very focused and concentrated for almost an hour while painting — choosing green, yellow and blue for his latest work-in-progress and rubbing the oil colors into the canvas with his tiny fingers.
Eghan says becoming a world record holder has not changed their lives. She won’t sell “The Crawl” but plans on keeping it in the family.
She added that she hopes the media attention around her boy could encourage and inspire other parents to discover and nurture their children’s talents.
“He is painting and growing and playing in the whole process,” she says.
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GRINDAVIK, Iceland — Lava continued to spurt from a volcano in southwestern Iceland on Thursday but the activity had calmed significantly from when it erupted a day earlier.
The eruption Wednesday was the fifth and most powerful since the volcanic system near Grindavik reawakened in December after 800 years, gushing record levels of lava as its fissure grew to 3.5 kilometers in length.
Volcanologist Dave McGarvie calculated that the amount of lava initially flowing from the crater could have buried the soccer pitch at Wembley Stadium in London under 15 meters of lava every minute.
“These jets of magma are reaching like 50 meters, into the atmosphere,” said McGarvie, an honorary researcher at Lancaster University. “That just immediately strikes me as a powerful eruption. And that was my first impression … then some numbers came out, estimating how much was coming out per minute or per second and it was, ‘Wow.'”
The activity once again threatened Grindavik, a coastal town of 3,800 people, and led to the evacuation of the popular Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, one of Iceland’s biggest tourist attractions.
Grindavik, which is about 50 kilometers southwest of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, has been threatened since a swarm of earthquakes in November forced an evacuation in advance of the initial December 18 eruption. A subsequent eruption consumed several buildings.
Protective barriers outside Grindavik deflected the lava Wednesday but the evacuated town remained without electricity and two of the three roads into town were inundated with lava.
“I just like the situation quite well compared to how it looked at the beginning of the eruption yesterday,” Grindavik Mayor Fannar Jónasson told national broadcaster RUV.
McGarvie said the eruption was more powerful than the four that preceded it because the largest amount of magma had accumulated in a chamber underground before breaking the earth’s surface and shooting into the sky.
The rapid and powerful start of the eruption followed by it diminishing quickly several hours later is the pattern researchers have witnessed with this volcano, McGarvie said. It’s unknown when eruptions at this volcano will end.
“It could go on for quite some considerable time,” McGarvie said. “We’re really in new territory here because eruptions like this have never been witnessed, carefully, in this part of Iceland.”
Iceland, which sits above a volcanic hot spot in the North Atlantic, sees regular eruptions. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and led to widespread airspace closures over Europe.
None of the current cycle of eruptions have had an impact on aviation.
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