Love this kind of innovation: “The HTI HydroPack is like a Capri Sun pouch for Disaster Relief… it has powdered nutrients inside. But it’s really a filter you can drop in any water source—a swimming pool, a mud puddle, a contaminated aquifer—and eight to twelve hours later the pack has filled itself with potable, fortified water.”
From the original post, located here.
SeaSwarm is an oil cleaning robot army, developed by MIT. It’s a fleet of autonomous, solar-powered robots which communicate with each other via Wi-Fi and GPS to collectively clean surface oil from a spill.
Each robot has a flexible conveyer belt made of a thin nanowire mesh which does the oil collection, by rolling softly over the ocean’s surface. The magic happens in the nanofabric (developed at MIT), which absorbs up to 20 times its weight in hydrophobic liquids, like oil (without picking up any water). Processing the material involves heating it to extract the oil, and then the nano fabric can be used over and over. This is done locally to avoid repeated trips back to shore, which would significantly slow collection time.
SeaSwarm estimates that a team of 5,000 of these robots operating continuously would be able to clean up an area the size of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill.
This is some awesome innovation!
