Sunlight-powered purifier could clean water for the impoverished

One-tenth of the world’s population lacks clean water. Now, researchers report they have developed a cheap solar still, which uses sunlight to purify dirty water up to four times faster than a current commercial version. The raw materials cost less than $2 per square meter. The technology will “allow people to generate their own drinking water much like they generate their own power via solar panels on their house roof,” says Zhejun Liu, a visiting scholar at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo and one of the study’s co-authors.