Toxic Chemicals and PageRank
Researchers have developed a new way of modeling and therefore effectively containing toxic spills in water, and the method is based on an important algorithm that you probably take advantage of every day: PageRank. PageRank is the idea that one can model a network of nodes that have directed links and use the model to quantitatively determine node values. This idea is most popularly used with using links to rank pages of the internet and make web crawling searches produce optimal results; however, it can be also be analogous to the distribution of a fluid. In the most general sense, a node with more nodes pointing toward it (and therefore more value) will distribute its value among the nodes it points to, and this cycle will continue until an equilibrium is reached (aka the values no longer change). This is loosely comparable to how two liquids move when mixed; one liquid (value) will keep moving through the other liquid in a certain direction (determined by fluid dynamics) to adjacent areas until an equilibrium is reached.
Scientists have been utilizing this concept to map how toxic chemicals will move in water. Instead of ranking pages, they are using forces from chemical reactions and density distributions to show where the chemicals will move next with the water itself acting as the network. Ultimately, the goal is to be able to model chemical spills in such a way that clean-up can be conducted in a very targeted manner for optimal efficiency. On a larger scale, oil spills in oceans could be contained with prior knowledge of how the oil will move in the water, both on the molecular level and with ocean currents factored in (comparable to directed links to different nodes in the initial calculations used to try to find equilibrium).
Their application of the PageRank algorithm is open source with the idea that it can be applied to other areas of scientific research.
Source: http://www.wired.com/2012/02/google-pagerank-water/