Yes, I wrote this post just for the headline… but it does have science!

The city of Los Angeles today deliberately released 400,000 black ‘bird balls’ into the Ivanhoe Reservoir (the reservoir to the north of Dodger’s Stadium) to protect the local drinking water. Apparently Bromine is naturally present in ground water while the city adds chlorine to kill the bacteria. Mix in sunlight and you have the carcinogen bromate. The black balls prevent sunlight from reaching the water and creating the carcinogen. The Ivanhoe and the Elysian Reservoir (west of the stadium) will be covered with the balls for four years.

There is a video on the site showing the launching of the 400,000 black balls, but it’s not nearly as cool as this one (the making of the Sony Bravia Ad)…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.