From Toilet To Tap Water

[@AristarcoPalacios]

Noura Shehab, you are AWESOME!!!

[@1NeonLight]

My favorite comic is covering my field of research? YAY!

[@boballende]

Excellent as always!

[@krisanthonysilveira8244]

our undergraduate project is MFC and that idea is friggin amazinggg ... loved to see a phd student and her ideas on the topic ..

[@fabioshinichi]

Thats simply amazing. You see, there is solution for everything, just need the right people and the will to do it.

[@LeTRafRunner]

Nice! I hope we learn to to more of this kind of stuff in the future!

[@kkhamees123]

مبروك دكتورة وبحث مثير للغاية. من المخلفات نشرب ومن المخلفات تُضاء المنازل.

[@Yadobler]

Very nice, like in my country quite a lot of our water come from poop water, but to have a self-sustaining treated-water supply is great

[@realchannel-ei4cv]

I would think it is way way efficient to use electricity to filter and reuse waste water for farming after.

[@illustriouschin]

gonna run a desalination plant on a few millivolts?

[@onelowerlight]

4:02 What is the hottest, nastiest room you've been in unintentionally? ;)

[@zbesh]

is it scalable?

[@InvitingShores]

Pioneering!

[@wedgewizard5429]

Maybe you can use recycled sewage water for agriculture. Agriculture already uses feces as fertilizer. If you have an issue with the IDEA of recycled sewage water, using it to supplement agriculture would divert the rest of the "normal" water for people.

[@hummingfrog]

Cheerful female scientists is not the image that normally comes to mind when I think of Saudi Arabia. In fact, of all the countries in the world, Saudi Arabia is the one that treats women the worst. And Arab countries in general tend tend to be unproductive scientific backwaters. So I'm quite curious how the PHD Comics people ended up where they did. I'd be willing to bet the trip was organized by some Saudi PR flack who was trying to improve the country's image! (Also, I wonder how many lashes Ms. Shehab would get if she took off that scarf?)

[@alexandralockwood5577]

First off, that scarf comment was unnecessary. Noura chooses to cover her hair and would not be whipped if she removed her scarf. Secondly, it was MY idea to go to Saudi and there are PLENTY of happy and productive female scientists here. Hope this helps to clarify your misunderstandings.

[@fermilad]

Hi, show producer Matt Siegler here. I was fairly pleasantly surprised by our trip to Saudi Arabia in many ways. I came in with many of the biases of the commenter. The KAUST University campus was very open and had rules as any American campus (save drinking, but that is not so bad, seeing what we do with that freedom at our universities). On Campus, women could dress as they pleased, without scarves, even wear bikinis at the pool or beach. On campus they could drive, live alone, etc. There seem to be many happy women at KAUST and I found it, by my own biased standards, a generally positive step for the region. I hope others, including the commenter, agree. Off campus, we did have to respect national rules, but even then, the women of are cast and crew did not have to cover there head, but rather only had to wear something akin to a judge's robe. Sure, its not fair by my religious traditions, but it wasn't what our biases lead us to fear. The trip was in no way funded as a Saudi government PR move. Alex was invited to come by a former colleague and was able to get them to invite out crew of 4 (2 men, 2 women). It was a pretty neat experience overall. All the best.

[@hummingfrog]

Matthew Siegler Thank you for the reply Matthew! (And Alexandra too). Yes, the scarf comment was snarky, but given, for example, the well publicized case of a woman being sentenced to 10 lashes in 2011 for the crime of driving a car, I don't think it was totally out of line. After all, there *are* places in the Arab world where a woman *can* get whipped for uncovering her head in public. I do stand by my comments about Saudi Arabia treating women badly, and the general scientific backwardness of Arab countries. And don't even get me started on Saudi Arabia's creation of and financial support for the Salafi madrasas that have supplied so many of the foot soldiers for Islamic terrorists organization all over the world. I could go on and on about the malignity of Saudi Arabia. And while I don't doubt your good faith, your videos *do* function as positive PR for the place! You may have been invited by a colleague, but I'd be interested in knowing who cleared the visit. And who paid for it. Not questions I really have any right to ask, I know, but that's what I was getting at with my shorthand reference to a "PR flack." That said, it's interesting to hear that the rules are so different at KAUST University. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. I suspect it's just the usual double standard for the elite, but maybe change isn't impossible? It will have to overcome widespread popular support for Salafism/Wahhabism though, so it's hard to see that happening any time soon. But who knows. BTW, I'm a failed PHD candidate myself (technically an ABD I suppose, many years ago), and a regular reader of PHD Comics.

[@ShadowebEB]

Saudi Arabia is under sharia law, that means they are instructed by their primitive book to kill people leaving their religion, and other bullshit like that. I am happy to see that in other parts they are becoming more evolved. I just hope they will one day stop following their barbaric primitive law.

[@ShadowebEB]

Good to hear that Saudi Girl you are brave! But watch out your words because you can have big troubles for openly saying that you are not muslim anymore. Read this www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/07/1327823/-Brave-atheist-to-be-tortured-imprisoned-in-Saudi-Arabia-Christian-persecution-fetishists-quiet#

[@mgha11]

This university is an "isolated island" in Saudi Arabia and never be an example of how women are treated there. Go to any regular university and see how do they really live!

[@eltharynd]

This wasn't how i pictured Dune's stillsuits at all

[@AristarcoPalacios]

Yeah! Women in Science FTW!!!

[@Groaznic]

Huge vaporware. No mention of the actual microbial current produced, it is probably insignificant and could barely power a LED. On the other hand, it takes a monstrous amount of electricity for desalination, so unless you'll use all of Saudi Arabia's crap water to desalinate a small glass of fresh water, not to mention the cost of integrating the microbial cells with the desalination plant, this is a bullshit PR move. I was expecting more critical thinking from PHD Comics.

[@petros_adamopoulos]

Yeah, just be careful not getting decapitated for witchcraft!