Collaborate Disseminate
Alkali flies have been a fixture of Mono Lake, California for hundreds of years, but scientists only recently unravelled the secret of their aquatic abilities. Continue reading After Hundreds of Years, We’ve Finally Figured Out How These Flies Can Swim Underwater
Coral doesn’t have to be doomed, we just have to actually try to save it. Continue reading We’ve Saved One of the Coral Reefs by Simply Bothering to Do Something
Most of us take it for granted that water is as close as your kitchen tap. But that’s not true everywhere. Two scientists at MIT have a new method for harvesting water from fog, especially fog released from cooling towers such as those found from power plants. It turns out, harvesting water from fog isn’t a new idea. You typically insert a mesh into the air and collect water droplets from the fog. The problem is with a typical diameter of 10 microns, the water droplets mostly miss the mesh, meaning they typically extract no more than 2% of the …read more
Officials are posting data from individual houses to try and convince people to conserve water—at the cost of their privacy. Continue reading Cape Town Is Surveilling Residents to Shame Them Into Using Less Water
From the windtraps and stillsuits of Dune’s Arrakis, to the moisture vaporators of Tatooine, science fiction has invented fantastic ways to collect the water necessary for life on desert worlds. On Earth we generally have an easier go of it, but water supply in arid climates is still an important issue. Addressing this obstacle, a team of researchers from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley have developed a method to tease moisture out of thin air.
A year after the team first published their idea, they have successfully field-tested their method on an Arizona State University rooftop in …read more
When was the last time you poured water onto your radio to turn it on?
Designed collaboratively by [Tore Knudsen], [Simone Okholm Hansen] and [Victor Permild], Pour Reception seeks to challenge what constitutes an interface, and how elements of play can create a new experience for a relatively everyday object.
Lacking buttons or knobs of any kind, Pour Reception appears an inert acrylic box with two glasses resting on top. A detachable instruction card cues the need for water, and pouring some into the glasses wakes the radio.
Inside, two aluminium plates — acting as capacitive touch sensors — are …read more
The government and industry groups have given West Virginia University over $3 million to study whether it’s a feasible idea. Continue reading The Plan to Extract Rare Earth Metals from Coal Mining Waste
Ads for bottled water make it seem safer and purer than normal tap water, researchers say. Continue reading We Keep Buying Bottled Water Because We Fear Death
Are people looking to profit from “Day Zero”? Continue reading Online Vendors Try to Make a Quick Buck as Cape Town Runs Out of Water
Things rarely go well when humans mix with wildlife. The problems are exacerbated in the suburbs, where bears dine on bird feeders and garbage cans, raccoons take up residence in attics, and coyotes make off with the family cat. And in the suburbs, nuisance wildlife can be an intractable problem because the options for dealing with it are so limited.
Not to be dissuaded in the battle to protect his roses, [dlf.myyta] built this motion-activated sentry gun to apply some watery aversion therapy to marauding deer. Shown in action below against a bipedal co-conspirator, the sentry gun has pretty much …read more
Continue reading Auto-Tracking Sentry Gun Gives Deer a Super Soaking