Your Future Smartphone May Detect Problems in Your Water

Your Future Smartphone May Detect Problems in Your Water

Biosensors on a touchscreen are showing promise for detecting arsenic and lead in water.

Photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash

In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan switched the residents' water supply to the Flint river, citing cheaper costs. However, due to improper filtering, lead contaminated this water, and according to the Associated Press, many of the city's residents soon reported health issues like hair loss and rashes. In 2015, a report found that children there had high levels of lead in their blood. The National Resource Defense Council recently discovered there could still be as many as twelve million lead pipes carrying water to homes across the U.S.

What if Flint residents and others in afflicted areas could simply flick water onto their phone screens and an app would tell them if they were about to drink contaminated water? This is what researchers at the University of Cambridge are working on to prevent catastrophes like what occurred in Flint, and to prepare for an uncertain future of scarcer resources.

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Hanna Webster
Hanna Webster is a freelance science writer based in San Diego, California. She received a Bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and creative writing in 2018 from Western Washington University, and is now a graduate student in the MA Science Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. She writes stories about neuroscience, biology, and public health. Her essays and articles have appeared in Jeopardy Magazine and Leafly. When Hanna is not writing, she enjoys consuming other art forms, such as photography, poetry, creative nonfiction, and live music
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Getty Images

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MILESTONE: Doctors have transplanted a pig organ into a human for the first time in history

A surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital prepares a pig organ for transplant.

Michelle Rose/Massachusetts General Hospital

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital made history last week when they successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human patient for the first time ever.

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Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.