Inhabitat's Week in Green: lights, water, action
The Week in Green is a new item from our friends at Inhabitat, recapping the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us.
The past week was also awash in H2O tech as researchers unveiled fresh new ways to keep us hydrated and produce clean power. One team of MIT researchers successfully harnessed viruses to split molecules of water to create hydrogen fuel, while another team unveiled a stamp-sized water purifying chip that can be lined up in arrays to generate 15 liters of water per hour. Meanwhile, Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza took a different tact to water purification altogether: he's created a group of robotic "nomad plants" that harvest sludge from polluted rivers and use it as an energy source.
We also saw several advances in wearable technology that could improve your game and keep you wired throughout the day. Three engineering students from Northeastern University have developed a "data-logging" compression shirt that helps baseball pitchers avoid torn ligaments, and designer Jennifer Darmour has created a "social-networking garment" that allows you to connect with your virtual audience with every move you make!
We also covered several remarkable transportation developments, starting with DARPA's plans to build a futuristic flying transformer car. Speaking of high-flying transportation, we caught wind of a prototype high speed solar airship that could one day offer an emission-free method of hauling cargo across the US. Finally, South Africa is getting set to jump on the high speed rail "train" as it announced it is working on a new rail network that will cut transit times in twain, improve economic development, and modernize the country.
First to ruin the joy of a troll.
@Ryan1000000 Quick someone call Alanis, we've got a decent example for her!
cool
Green tech is dubious at best. Not convinced yet about origami made, wind powered airplanes and hydro-electric lightbulbs which become dimmer everytime a polar bear dies. (But that won't happen because thanks to global warming, the temperature is now colder for Mr. Bear)
Green tech is obviously important, we will run out of oil during my lifetime at the current rate of expansion, but powering lights by tomatoes (whilst cool) doesn't exactly lend credibility to the movement. Focusing on products similar to the, now forgotten for about the next 5 years, Bloom Box (remember how excited everyone was, for a couple of days) is more likely to bring the investment that is needed from cynical companies and governments.
The water purifier thing .. it won't get used. You can distribute it ..one per family .. it will get used for a few days then discarded.They need to make a solar powered device that extracts water from the air or humidity.
The only thing that would work is building up infrastructure, but that requires capital.
@JS
Why would it get discarded? It's supposed to be small-scale, so you could purify water a liter at a time and power it with a handcrank. Plenty of families in developing countries have access to water, but not clean, drinkable water. Using this, they could get small amounts of water from rivers, oceans or greywater and purify it for drinking, potentially for free.
@JS I think it would be used as well. Many people know their water is bad for them (it isn't hard for them to figure out what is causing their diarrhea), and if they see results they'll keep using it. Education is key.
Will the water purifying chip be available on the market within 150 days, because I really need to find one by then...
I like how there are people that complain about Engadget being iPhone and Apple centric and yet a post like this only gets 8 or 9 comments?!
There are a lot of interesting things happening here and everyone is on the "iphone 4g" story whether they hate it or not.
Regardless, great stuff coming out of this fair. Hope this comes to fruition on a bigger scale soon.
What process does this chip put the water through in order to purify it
Wow! That water purification chip is amazing. I don’t think most people realize that 1 billion people don’t have access to clean water. We need to continue to strive to push the boundaries of technologies to and try and tackle these types of basic need “mega problems”. They say that this technology can be run off a solar cell. Even this part of the system would have been a huge problem just a few years ago because of how costly solar cells can be. I recently saw a video about how military scientists have just developed a cheap and flexible solar cell that is 10,000 times more efficient than the old standard! I’ll post a link to the video so you can check out this amazing breakthrough for yourself. It’s creativity and innovations like this that will keep our world moving forward in the right direction for years to come.
http://www.ndep.us/Its-a-Small-World