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Engineering clean rivers

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Woman stands knee-deep in water, beside her is a superimposed image of fish with universal biohazard symbol
Engineering clean rivers

SUBJECTS:  Science, Technologies

YEARS:  7–8, 9–10


Figuring out how to clean up contaminated rivers is a big challenge.

It's also tricky to work out where the most contaminated parts of a river system are and whether its fish are safe to eat.

Watch this video and learn how engineering has helped to solve these problems. Why do you think engineers looked to the bottom of the food chain for help to develop a solution?

What is the polyethylene sampler able to do? How?

Can you think of other problems that have been solved by engineering inspired by nature?


Acknowledgements

Engineering River Cleanups from MIT's Science Out Loud downloaded from PBS LearningMedia, http://www.pbslearningmedia.org. Rights to use this asset do not expire. Asset Copyright MIT. Credits: Hosted and written by: Jennifer Apell, Additional scripting: Elizabeth Choe, George Zaidan, Executive producer: Elizabeth Choe, Director: George Zaidan, Editor: Per Hoel, Production assistant: Ryan Pelletier. Hudson River pollution image from Dept. of Justice (http://www.justice.gov/enrd/3386.htm). Hudson sky-view video from The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.31144). Dredging footage courtesy of Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University — recorded by David Rosoff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egKdpEA4_t8). Music: Podington Bear, "Light In Branches" (http://freemusicarchive.org/), Small Colin, "Mutations" (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/). Special Thanks: David Rosoff, Scottee Cantrell.


Date of broadcast: 24 Nov 2014


Copyright

Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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