{"id":43845,"date":"2022-07-30T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-30T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/?post_type=ftm_episode&p=43845"},"modified":"2022-08-04T17:07:32","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T21:07:32","slug":"oil-spills","status":"publish","type":"ftm_episode","link":"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/series\/hard-reset\/oil-spills","title":{"rendered":"Engineering oleophilic sponges to save the oceans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

No matter what your take on fossil fuels or renewable energy is \u2013 we can all agree that oil spills are not great, and we need a better way to clean them up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, to clean up the thousands of oil spills that happen each year in the United States, we mainly just set them on fire. It’s called an in-situ burn. You get it so it’s thick enough on top of the water that you can strike a flame and it’ll actually just burn away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


But what if you could pull that oil out – and use it? And what if we might all be sitting on the solution? A new wave of material sciences could help us start cleaning the environment instead of just well, using it as a trash can. <\/strong>It turns out just one super common material, with a few atomic modifications, can clean up oil spills better than anything else we\u2019ve got<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA new wave of material sciences could help us start cleaning the environment instead of just, well, using it as a trash can.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":44555,"menu_order":0,"template":"","ftm_taxonomy_fields":[],"ftm_taxonomy_challenges":[],"ftm_taxonomy_hidden_tags":[],"class_list":["post-43845","ftm_episode","type-ftm_episode","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nEngineering oleophilic sponges to save the oceans<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cA new wave of material sciences could help us start cleaning the environment instead of just, well, using it as a trash can.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/series\/hard-reset\/oil-spills\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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