One-third of the world's population lives in countries with insufficient freshwater to support the population,according to the UN Environment Programme.For that reason,desalination plants that extract drinking water from seawater are increasingly popular across the world.But many water-poor countries cannot afford the conventional desalination technology-reverse osmosis-because of its relatively high cost.Menachem Elimelech,a professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale University,and his graduate researchers Robert McGinnis and Jeffrey McCutcheon are hoping to reduce the cost of desalinating water with a new technology they have developed that they call forward osmosis desalination.
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