If you ever have used a salad spinner to dry out your lettuce then you know the principle behind the GiraDora, loosely meaning “spinning washing machine” in Spanish. GiraDora both washes and spin dries clothes placed in it, and it does it without electricity, just pedal po

I don’t know how I missed this gadget which one a design award back in 2010. It is called the DewBank and it is biomimetic device that collects and channels water into a bottle even in a desert climate. Simply place the stainless steel device on a flat, windless area in the even

MadiDrop is the name. Water purification is the game. What is it? Who invented it? How does it work? MadiDrop is a small ceramic disk (see image below) containing either silver or copper nanoparticles. It is a product of PureMadi, a non-profit organization associated with the Universi

How can a substance that makes up the bulk of our atmosphere here on Earth be a pollutant? I’m talking about nitrogen, the most abundant element in the air we breathe, and an extremely important element in plant nutrition. Our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. But the nitrogen is nonr

Last Friday I was sitting on a balcony in Jamaica with the sound of the sea and reggae in the background. Today as I look out my window here in Toronto we are experiencing a winter storm that will dump 40 centimeters (up to a foot-and-a-half) of snow on the city. You can see the befor

In the last week four reports have made the headlines with human induced climate change playing a principal role in each. The headlines: Great Lakes Region Stressed; Drought Continues in American Heartland; Mississippi-Missouri River System At Record Low Water Levels; December Heat Me

Harvesting algae cost-effectively has been a real challenge for those who are seeking alternative sources for biofuel production. Identified challenges include: The volume of water required to get harvestable algae. Conventional methods for getting the water out of the biomass are ene

This last week we learned that there is frozen water at Mercury’s poles and that water has been detected by Curiosity in its exploration of Gale Crater. Water seems to be abundant in the Solar System but increasingly scarce here on Earth. I’m not talking about oceans of wa

Currently airing on PBS, the American public broadcaster, is the Ken Burns’ documentary, The Dust Bowl, describing the ecological disaster that swept through the U.S. Midwest in the 1930s, a combination of bad agricultural practices accompanied by a decade-long drought. The bad

This week’s five stories look at: Deploying 3D Printers in the Military Rapid Prototyping; A New Device To Replace Man’s Best Friend When Hunting Bombs; Poo to Power Microsoft’s Latest Data Center; Mars No Worse Than Living in Low-Earth Orbit and Guess What, There