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Scientists Discover Bacteria That Makes Toxic Water Safe To Drink
Treating wastewater using the newly discovered bacteria doesn’t require expensive equipment and chemicals, so it can be done at scale at a reasonable price.
UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that 1 in 3 people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water. In places where safe drinking water is scarce, nutrition-related problems are prevalent, children have trouble staying focused in school, and diseases caused by bacteria and unhygienic practices are common.
Solving this global problem is one of the greatest challenges of our time, which is why many scientists from around the world are researching all kinds of methods for making unsafe water drinkable.
Among them are Dr. Vishal Mishra and PhD student Veer Singh from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IIT-BHU). Recently, the two scientists have published a paper in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, describing their discovery of a bacteria capable of separating toxic metal from wastewater and making it safe to drink.
They named the bacteria “Microbacterium paraoxydans strain VSVM IIT (BHU),” and described it as very effective when it comes to the elimination of hexavalent chromium, a known carcinogen and a reproductive toxicant present in many water sources around the world.
“It is very effective for removal of hexavalent chromium from wastewater compared to other conventional methods,” said Dr. Mishra. “This bacterial strain showed fast growth rate in the Hexavalent chromium Cr (VI) containing aqueous medium and gets easily separated from the aqueous medium after the treatment process”.
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Treating wastewater using the newly discovered bacteria doesn’t require expensive equipment and chemicals, so it can be done at scale at a reasonable price.
In India, the country from where the two scientists come from, less than 50 percent of the population has access to safely managed drinking water, and water contamination is present in more than 1.96 million dwellings. Hopefully, this and other similar discoveries will eventually help reduce these numbers to zero.
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NVIDIA Puts GPT-5.5 Codex In Hands Of 10,000 Staff
The chipmaker has significantly expanded OpenAI’s latest model across teams from engineering to HR under tight internal controls.
NVIDIA has started rolling out OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model through the Codex coding agent to more than 10,000 employees, extending the tool well beyond software teams and into core business functions.
The deployment covers engineering, product, legal, marketing, finance, sales, HR, operations and developer programs. Staff are using Codex for coding, internal research and routine knowledge work as companies test whether AI agents can move from demos to daily use.
GPT-5.5 is running on NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, linking OpenAI’s newest model directly to the chipmaker’s latest infrastructure push. NVIDIA said the systems cut cost per million tokens by 35 times and raise token output per second per megawatt by 50 times versus earlier generations.
Inside the company, it says the effects are immediate. Debugging work that once took days is being finished in hours and experiments across large codebases that used to stretch over weeks are now handled overnight. Teams are also building features from natural-language prompts with fewer failed runs.
In a company-wide note urging staff to adopt the tool, CEO Jensen Huang wrote: “Let’s jump to lightspeed. Welcome to the age of AI.”
Security remains central to the rollout. Codex can connect through Secure Shell to approved cloud virtual machines, allowing agents to work with company data without moving it outside approved environments. NVIDIA said it assigned cloud VMs to employees so agents run in isolated sandboxes with full audit trails.
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The company added that the setup uses a zero-data-retention policy. Access to production systems is read-only through command-line tools and internal automation layers.
The move also highlights NVIDIA’s long relationship with OpenAI. NVIDIA said the partnership began in 2016, when Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAI’s San Francisco office.
The two companies have since worked across hardware and model deployment. NVIDIA also said OpenAI plans to deploy more than 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for future AI infrastructure.
For Gulf markets pouring money into sovereign AI and enterprise automation, the signal is clear: internal AI agents are moving from pilot phase to standard tooling.
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