What do you believe is the single most important factor driving up the cost of living in Nigeria?

A team of engineers at Nanjing University, working with a pair of colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a new way to extract lithium from briny water.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes the process they developed and the device they built and how it could be used to extract lithium from various natural sources. Seth Darling, with Argonne National Laboratory in the U.S., has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team on this new effort.

Lithium is in high demand due to its use in batteries. Unfortunately, its traditional sources, hard rock ores, are expected to decline in the coming years. Because of that, scientists have been looking for other sources like briny water found in the world's oceans. Prior research has suggested there is more than enough to meet global demand for as long as needed.

The problem is extracting the lithium in a way that does not pollute the environment and is relatively inexpensive to obtain. In this new effort, the research team has developed an approach called solar transpiration-powered lithium extraction and storage (STLES).

• Read More