Yael: Hey Don, did you know that there are over three-hundred- thousand toxic waste      sites across the country?

Don: Really, Yael? I had no idea there were that many.

Y: Yep. Military bases, airports, anywhere there's a factory or some kind of industry      you get toxic chemicals leeching into the soil and contaminating groundwater.

D: That sounds bad. What's being done to clean it up?

Y: Glad you asked. There are some conventional methods, such as pumping toxic water      up to the surface and siphoning out the chemicals. But that's expensive, and you still      have to get rid of the waste somehow.

D: Aren't some scientists working on alternate ways to clean up hazardous waste? I      read something about scientists at Rice University that use nanotechnology to      detoxify soil and water.

Y: That's right. Michael Wong, who's a chemical engineer at Rice, uses particles made      of gold and a metal called palladium that are just four nanometers across. That's      about twenty or so atoms per particle. Palladium alone is pretty good at breaking      down toxic chemicals, particularly a common one called trichloroethylene, or TCE.      But when you put palladium and gold together, the particles break down TCE even      faster and render it non-toxic. Plus, using these nano clean-up particles could be a lot      cheaper than conventional water purifying methods.

D: So the nano-particles not only detoxify groundwater but also actually get rid of the      dangerous chemicals by breaking them down. And it's less expensive to do this than      what we do now.

Y: Yep. The next step is to get the nano particles out of the lab and into ground to make      all those waste sites less hazardous.  

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