What, how do these work, and which chemicals or compounds in wastewater are targeted using this technology?

Right.

So one of the biggest challenges in the wastewater refining area is selectivity.

If there are dozens of different chemicals swimming in the water, so to speak, how do I just select one out? And that's what I alluded to with the needle in a haystack analogy.

And so what these, what these ligand exchangers allow us to do is they allow us to expand what's been done already.

So if we have, like, a selective filter, another analogy here you can think of is, like, a Brita filter or, like, a, some type of filter in your refrigerator or something, in your filtered water bottle.

What that filter is, if you open that filter up, like I did when I was a kid 'cause I was curious and got into things, okay? But if you open it up, you'll see a bunch of little, like, rock-looking particles, and those particles are called adsorbent beads because they adsorb pollutants from the water and they clean it up for you.

Mm-hmm.

Crop, that's crop with an O.

O.Yes, we have.

(laughs) Would you- would you eat a crop, would you eat a plant that had been fertilized with urine or urine-derived fertilizer? And the question, a question that kept coming up was, what about the pharmaceuticals in urine? And, um, this was from kind of the general public, and we were really pleased to, to hear this because th- this was the same thing we were thinking about in the lab.

The short answer is that, uh, urine does contain a fair number of pharmaceuticals and, um, these pharmaceuticals in wastewater treatment plants, we tend to remove them through chemical processes most of the time.

Um, and if we don't or if we don't do it well, it can cause ecosystem effects, right? You may have heard of, um, change in gender dynamics in fish populations, for example-

And so that's more than half of the human population.

Right.

Right, right.