Technology

For many of us, clean, drinkable water comes right out of the tap. But for billions itnot that simple, and all over the world researchers are looking into ways to fix that. Today brings work from Berkeley, where a team is working on a water-harvesting apparatus that requires no power and can produce water even in the dry air of the desert. Hey, if a cactus can do it, why can&t we

While there are numerous methods for collecting water from the air, many require power or parts that need to be replaced; what professor Omar Yaghi has developed needs neither.

The secret isn&t some clever solar concentrator or low-friction fan — itall about the materials. Yaghi is a chemist, and has created whatcalled a metal-organic framework, or MOF, thateager both to absorb and release water.

Itessentially a powder made of tiny crystals in which water molecules get caught as the temperature decreases. Then, when the temperature increases again, the water is released into the air again.

Yaghi demonstrated the process on a small scale last year, but now he and his team have published the results of a larger field test producing real-world amounts of water.

They put together a box about two feet per side with a layer of MOF on top that sits exposed to the air. Every night the temperature drops and the humidity rises, and water is trapped inside the MOF; in the morning, the sunheat drives the water from the powder, and it condenses on the boxsides, kept cool by a sort of hat. The result of a nightwork: 3 ounces of water per pound of MOF used.

Thatnot much more than a few sips, but improvements are already on the way. Currently the MOF uses zicronium, but an aluminum-based MOF, already being tested in the lab, will cost 99 percent less and produce twice as much water.

With the new powder and a handful of boxes, a persondrinking needs are met without using any power or consumable material. Add a mechanism that harvests and stores the water and you&ve got yourself an off-grid potable water solution.

&There is nothing like this,& Yaghi explained in a Berkeley news release. &It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. The aluminum MOF is making this practical for water production, because it is cheap.&

He says there are already commercial products in development. More tests, with mechanical improvements and including the new MOF, are planned for the hottest months of the summer.

Just processed by the SEC on this bright Friday afternoon:TraceLink,a software-as-a-service platform for tracking pharmaceuticals and trying to weed out counterfeit prescription drugs in the process, has raised $60 million in Series D funding.

The filing shows that 18 firms participated, including, presumably, Goldman Sachs, whose growth equity arm had led the company$51.5 million Series C round roughly 18 months ago. Others of the nine-year-old companyearlier investors include FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital and F-Prime Capital.

As TCJordan Crook reported at the time of that last round, TraceLink helps pharma companies comply with country-specific track-and-trace requirements through their supply chain, which has grown increasingly important following the passage of theDrug Supply Chain Security Actin 2013. The consumer-protection measure aims toprotect consumers from exposure to drugs that could be counterfeit, stolen, contaminated or otherwise harmful.

At the time of its enactment, it also gave the industry one decade before unit-level traceability becomes enforced, meaning the clock is ticking.

Also working in the favor of TraceLink: opioids, whose spread has been rising since the late &90s, creating ever-growing pressure to isolate vulnerabilities in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

Little wonder the company looks to be preparing for life as a publicly traded company, including by releasing quarterly revenue and customer growth numbers. Indeed, according to its &growth highlights,& released just a couple of weeks ago, the companyfirst quarter revenue in 2018 was 69 percent higher than it was in the first quarter of 2017.

An optical illusion popular in the 19th century could make trips on the Hyperloop appear to take place in a transparent tube. Regularly spaced, narrow windows wouldn&t offer much of a view individually, but if dozens of them pass by every second an effect would be created like that of a zoetrope, allowing passengers to effectively see right through the walls.

Itan official concept from Virgin Hyperloop One and design house Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and in fact was teased back in 2016. Now the companies have shared a video showing how it would work and what it would look like for passengers — though thereno indication it would actually be put in place in the first tracks.

A zoetrope is a simple apparatus consisting of a cylinder with slits on the sides and a series of sequential or looping images printed on the inside. When the cylinder is spun, the slits blur together to the eye but have the effect of showing the images on the inside clearly as if they are succeeding one another — an elementary form of animation.

Want an example HerePixar breaking down a zoetrope it built for DisneyCalifornia Adventure:

The design concept shown is actually a linear zoetrope, in which the images are viewed not as a loop inside a cylinder, but in a long strip. You may have seen these before in the form of animated advertisements visible through the windows of subways.

In the case of the Hyperloop, the tube through which the &pod& moves would have portholes or slit windows placed every 10 meters through which the outside world is visible. At low speeds these would merely zoom by a few per second and might even be unpleasantly strobe-like, but that would smooth out as the pods reach their target speed of 1200 KPH (about 745 MPH).

The team simulated how it would appear in the video below:

Is it really necessary You could, of course, just provide a faked view of the outside via LCD &portholes& or have people focus on their own little TV screens, like on an airplane. But that wouldn&t be nearly as cool. Perhaps the windows could double as escape or access hatches; as you can see above on the existing test track, there are already such holes, so this may be easier than expected to implement.

Of course, it all seems a little premature, as Hyperloop type transport is still very much in prototype form and existing endeavors to bring it to life may in fact never come to fruition. Nevertheless, it is a clever and interesting way to solve the problem of preventing people from thinking about the fact that they&re traveling at ludicrous speeds down a narrow tube.