Jason Fitzpatrick
If you read any outdoor-oriented publications or follow any backpacking YouTube channels, you’ve probably seen at least somebody talking about LifeStraw, a portable water filter that’s, more or less, a giant straw. But does it work? Check out this guy’s lab experiment with it to see.
One thing you’ll notice, if you look up any information about the product, is that almost all the demo videos of people raving about how cool LifeStraw are just showing them out in the wilderness, turning gross swamp water into clean drinkable water. Even product material from LifeStraw has that general theme—like the photo above with a guy drinking right out of a stream with the LifeStraw.
The thing is, all that demonstrates to the viewer is that the muddy/green water is now clear water. Clear and seemingly clean water can still be teeming with microbes after all, right?
Over at the Sci-Inspi YouTube channel, they set up an experiment where they actually looked at the water sample before and after treatment with a high power microscope. The results are pretty neat:
So neat, in fact, that we think LifeStraw should hire this guy to make commercials for them. If you’d like to scoop up one of the straws for your home survival kit, you can pick one up here.
