THE GUARDIAN: Is there a beautiful, briny solution to the world’s clean water crisis?

Newer technology is also coming to the assistance of desalination advocates. The wonder substance graphene is inevitably one avenue being explored. A graphene “sieve” was created two years ago at the University of Manchester which cleans salts from brine and, if it can be scaled up, could be used for cheap desalination. Reporting on the work in the peer-review journal Nature Nanotechnology, Professor Rahul Raveendran Nair said: “Realisation of scalable membranes with uniform pore size, down to the atomic scale, is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology.”