Preparations

[Uthgaard]

That's why I thought you were talking about antibiotics. But you were saying vaccine. You use antibiotics for bacteria. Antibiotics come primarily from fungi. Virus particles can be killed any number of ways, including by bacteria.

Bacteria have been killing virus particles for a long time, they do it through things called restriction enzymes. But that isn't a vaccine and neither is iodine, a vaccine is a virus that has been essentially destroyed, or in more accurate terms, just the capsid and its native proteins, so the body can learn how to recognize and kill the virus itself.

[Jon Lemon]

The source of all this conflict is that you think vaccines against bacteria do not exist. In fact they number in the hundreds, as an immune response can be developed for virtually any antigen using the right preparation of antigen and adjuvant (known as a vaccine).

I will repeat that I have never claimed that iodine is a vaccine. Where's the bacterial antigen in iodine?

You think bacteria don't kill humans constantly? You realize that Y. Pestis is a bacterium and bubonic plague is no joke, right? You think bacterial pathogenicity can't be attenuated? Did you bother even a cursory google fact check before you let this nonsense flow?

We aren't even close to on the same page here.

[Uthgaard]

Hasbinbad actually understood this and got the take-home message from it, but water purification doesn't require any iodine or attenuation. What he outlined was a subjective way of saying "no more than 3 parts per million of chlorine" after 30 minutes. Chlorine is all you need for microbes, citric acid is all you need for pH. RO will handle everything else. You can make a crank generator from a sufficiently cheap reversible drill if gas power isn't available.

The water might be some funky color, but it will be safe to drink.

[Hasbinbad]

Originally Posted by Uthgaard [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You can make a crank generator from a sufficiently cheap reversible drill if gas power isn't available.

This is exactly what I'm after. I understand magnets and copper wire and all that, but only on a very cursory level. Can you describe specifics, or do you know of resources that lay this out?

[Hasbinbad]

Maybe one of you is using the defined scientific term "attenuate," while another is using the English word "attentuate."

[Hasbinbad]

Originally Posted by Hasbinbad [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Maybe one of you is using the defined scientific term "attenuate," while another is using the English word "attentuate."

This also separates the scientist from the lay person. A science major would know how these terms differ, whereas a lay person would assume "attenuation" as used in a journal means "attenuation" as defined in any given dictionary.

[Uthgaard]

Electromagnetism at its most basic level. You can think of electrcity and magnetism as antiperpendicular wave forms that run at 90 angles to each other.

Where electricity flows, so does magnetism. The opposite is also true. The drill works because it has a large magnet, and cheap drills don't usually have advanced circuitry to prevent current from flowing backward if the drill is rotated creating current, instead of current rotating the drill.

You can get these for about $10-$20. The types that run off of a single battery unit or only have a power cord are the easiest to make. Run wires from battery terminals or split the wires to whatever you want to power. Getting one of these is usually easier than trying to create a device, but you can by coiling a wire around a magnet.

It's ideal to store it in some rechargable battery, since it's unlikely to create a constant or sufficient voltage by hand. Chemical sources of power might be less crude and more reliable, but harder to replenish.

Also another way to get pure water is through acid-base neutralization. You'll wind up with some type of salt to filter out, but any acid and any base neutralize into pure water. Hydrochloric acid (a strong acid) and sodium hydroxide (lye) combine to form a solution of table salt in pure water.

[Hasbinbad]

Totally. I've just never seen a crank generator sold (haven't been looking), and while I know the concept, I probably couldn't manufacture one that worked worth a shit without a diagram..
Et viola! http://www.creative-science.org.uk/gen1.html
What about LED technology? Does anyone here have any experience with making simple LEDs?

[Uthgaard]

A crank generator is probably the simplest thing to create. The most complicated part would be deciding what kind of battery setup could accommodate that blends what you can afford with performance attributes.

Anything that creates a difference in electric potentials creates a voltage, you can think of it like water pressure. Rechargable batteries restore some of that charge. Practically, batteries in this situation would perform best when they aren't at a full charge. Most of the time spent charging a battery is when the battery is almost full. It takes less than half as much energy to charge a battery to 75% than it does to charge it the last 25%, so it's a lot like a concentration gradient made up of ions instead of solute.

The tricky part comes with spending the energy. You could create a battery pack out of batteries connected in series to charge them, and then just remove batteries to match the voltage requirements of whatever you're trying to power, but that's impractical for all but a few examples. Realistically you'd just need a device between the power supply and its final output that can regulate the voltage and current so that your device a) has enough to function and b) doesn't fry it. It's often a pretty thin line to walk.

You aren't likely to manufacture an LED. Diodes are essentially miniaturized vacuum tubes. You would have a lot of difficulty (read, basically impossible to DIY) growing the crystals to the required specs and without flaws, or to create the diode even if you did. On the other hand, they're really cheap since the manufacture is simple on the large scale in a specialized facility. Better off buying what you need.

[Uthgaard]

Also I just looked at that diagram. That's interesting but defeats the purpose of what I was explaining, since that requires a power source. What I was talking about was rotating the actual drill bit manually, creating a current inside the drill's circuitry and can be drawn from its battery terminals.