Inventions and Sustainability

[reasonsforhope]

Solar-powered generators pull clean drinking water 'from thin air,' aiding communities in need: 'It transforms lives'

The generators use a heat exchange and condensation method to capture water, after which a filtration and sanitization process makes it pota

"In drought-stricken areas, communities facing water shortages, or even in residential and commercial buildings eager to improve their environmental footprints, atmospheric water generators represent a new frontier in water production.

While it might sound like a tidbit from a science fiction movie, even the driest places on earth have moisture in the air that can be extracted and used for everyday necessities like plumbing and drinking. 

Unlike traditional dehumidifiers, which also pull moisture from the air, AWGs utilize filtration and sterilization technology to make water safe to drink. 

And while there are plenty of AWG companies out there — and the science itself isn’t novel — AWGs are becoming more efficient, affordable, and revolutionary in combating water scarcity in a myriad of communities.

Aquaria Technologies, a San Francisco-based AWG startup, was founded in 2022 to help provide affordable and clean drinking water in areas most affected by climate change. 

Using heat exchange and condensation, Aquaria’s generators draw air into their systems, cool that air below its dew point, and as it condenses, capture that water and filter it for consumption. 

As the cycle continues, the generator’s refrigerant vaporizes and goes through a process that cools it back into a liquid, meaning the heat transfer cycle repeats continuously in an energy-efficient and self-sustaining system.

“I’m sure you’ve had the experience in the summer, you take a glass of a cold drink out of the fridge and then water droplets form on the side of the bottle,” Aquaria’s co-founder and CEO Brian Sheng, said in a podcast episode. “That’s actually condensation.”

Sheng continued: “The question is, how do we create condensation? How do we extract water out of the air in large volume and using little energy? That’s what our technology does. We have created both active and passive cooling methods where we use special materials, and we’ve created heat exchange and recovery systems and airflow design, such that we’re maximizing heat exchange, and then we’re able to extract large volumes of water.”

Aquaria has created a number of generators, but its stand-alone model — the Hydropack X — can replace an entire home’s dependence on municipal water, producing as much as 264 gallons of potable water per day. 

Other models, like the Hydrostation, can provide water for up to 1,500 people at parks, construction sites, or other outdoor public areas. The Hydropixel can make 24 gallons of water per day for a seamless at-home application, requiring a simple outlet for power. 

“Atmospheric water generators present a groundbreaking solution to the global challenge of clean water scarcity, leveraging the humidity present in the air to produce potable water,” the company’s website explains.

“This technology is versatile, functioning efficiently across diverse climates — from arid regions to tropical settings. From rural communities in developing countries to advanced cities facing unexpected droughts, atmospheric water generators have a wide range of applications… transforming lives and providing secure, clean water sources.”

Considering an estimated 2.2 billion people lack access to clean water globally — including in American cities like Flint, Michigan, or Modesto, California — innovative solutions like AWGs are vital to maintaining the basic human right to clean water. 

The World Economic Forum has begun to dip its toes into this technology as well, implementing public and private partnerships to introduce AWG units in Arizona’s Navajo Nation, where the machines produce about 200 gallons of clean water per day.

“When combined with an appropriate level of community engagement and triple-bottom-line business (people, planet, profit),” a blog post for WE Forum said, “this model can be a powerful stopgap solution where few exist today.”

Similarly, according to New Atlas, Aquaria has a partnership with developers to supply its technology to a 1,000-home community in Hawaii later this year, relying entirely on atmospherically generated water.

The company also has a “Frontier Access Program,” which partners with water-related NGOs, community project developers, and sustainable development groups to deploy this technology in areas most in need.

Regardless of their use cases — in homes, in communities facing water shortages, or at aid sites navigating natural disasters — AWGs have a minimal environmental impact. Sourcing water “from thin air,” requires no plastic bottles, no large-scale plants using up loads of energy, and no byproducts that can harm the environment."

-via GoodGoodGood, August 27, 2024

[memewhore]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A little something I found on Twitter. Pls share

–

Submitted by @iceyfoxsblog​

[wasturbatress]

[raptorific]

If I didn’t remember actually reading this in an actual Calvin and Hobbes book as a child I’d think it was ironically photoshopped like those comics where Mickey Mouse and Goofy talk about how reality is an illusion but this comic strip was actually just……. already………… like that……………

[mockwa]

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

if you need me i am going to be binge-reading the archives of my favorite blog on the entire internet which is written by this sweet old man who lives on a farm in the pacific northwest with his husband and a bunch of animals. there are nice pictures of flowers and ducks and the tone is so gentle and soothing:

like… fuck…. i love everything about this blog…. it’s the one good thing left online

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

sir………i am literally crying right now

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

LOOK. AT. THEM.

[kendallroy-deactivated20210425]

oh to be a chicken eating organic steamed rice on a snowy day…. i mean…. my god

[punknatch]

In honor to my name(¿ some facts about punk

I will not waste time talking about where it started or with whom but when this movement gained strength as a form of political protest.

After the outcome of Falklands war/guerra de Malvinas In Britain, the questioned power of Margaret Thatcher gained more strength and support from the nationalist sector and won re-election. The working class was the most affected and the young people found a way of protest in the aforementioned genre.

Besides this, punk is inspired by the decostructivist movement that comes from the Russian Constructivism movement that arises after the wwi and the October Revolution (one of the most versatile and undervalue artistic movements that keep inspiring art, architecture and everthing today, even food!!) but going back to deconstructivism this is characterized by unpredictability and controlled chaos. From the distorsión in the music to the looks is all about breaking. They wanted change, they wanted representation in the political decisions, break the system to be free.

But punk is not only about chaos, punk is about hope as it is deconstructivism. Is about creating something new from something broken, to fix things. That’s why the patches and safety pins, take something old, used and miserable (as the working class felt at that time) and give it a new life, a new meaning. A rebellious meaning

[hogtown-iww]

Join the General Defense Committee!

What is the GDC?

The General Defense Committee is the mutual aid and community defense arm of the Industrial Workers of the World, and it’s really cool!  A GDC local will coordinate things like fundraising, legal council, jail support, activist training, and community defense & outreach.  Pretty neat, huh?

From the website at https://iww.org/projects/gdc :

“The capitalist class of bosses, financiers, landlords, and their cops wage relentless and violent class war upon the working class. The General Defense Committee (GDC) is a committee of and supports the revolutionary unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The GDC’s goal is to defend and support the entire working class, divided and under attack by those who wage class war against us. We therefore promote, through organization, action, and outreach, a mass, non-sectarian defense of the class, in order to build a self-organized working class that treats differences as strengths and opportunities to live in solidarity. Community Self Defense means we intend to build our revolutionary community precisely by defending it and the earth on which we live.

Our power as a class will never come from our possession of wealth, but from our ability to organize the class to defend ourselves. We must secure defense against legal attacks, but do not imagine that legal and financial defense alone are sufficient. Any revolutionary union that does not expect oppression from the master class, and organize to meet it, has failed to learn from past waves of repression.

We say defense means organized action taken explicitly to defend members of the class against the different forms of oppression that structure our society. Our membership expects the GDC to be an arena of mutual education through mutual struggle. Exploiters rely upon the fractured unity of the working class. By standing in solidarity across and directly attacking the diverse oppressions of the class, we intend to embody the notion that an injury to one really is an injury to all, and to openly use our defense to build the resilience, strength, and fighting spirit of the working class. Because the class war is not limited to the workplace, our defense of the class cannot be limited to the workplace. Oppressions like racism and sexism structure class oppression and division. Both degrade the solidarity members of the working class should have for each other, and are predicated on acts of violence within the class, and structures of violence organized by the state. We are against all oppressions. By organizing against the diverse oppressions of the working class, and centering our revolutionary and anti-capitalist foundations, we intend to directly overcome those divisions. Through this struggle we advance the goal of an anti-capitalist revolution by building the size, solidarity, and strength of working class.

The oppressed do not determine the grounds of their liberation; those grounds are chosen by the oppressors, whose warfare upon our class results in exclusion, harm, and death. We intend to meet our oppressors on whatever grounds we must, in order to complete the revolution against the capitalism that accelerates not only our exploitation throughout the world, but our entire world’s ecological peril. We reject sterile bureaucratic or legalistic restrictions on the revolutionary demands with which our union and our world is faced, recognizing that our history includes failed attempts to pretend allegiance to the state and capitalism. We make no pretense. We will defend and support each other.

The General Defense Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World demands hope and bravery of its membership, so that we can build and organize the class that is worthy of the revolution that we must make.”

Nice, huh?

And here’s a really sick interview that It’s Going Down did with Twin Cities GDC Local 14 on building working-class defense organizations: https://itsgoingdown.org/building-working-class-defense-organizations-interview-twin-cities-gdc/

Joining the GDC

The GDC is a project of the Industrial Workers of the World, but you don’t have to be an IWW member to get involved as long as you’re in agreement with the principles of anticapitalism, antifascism, and workers’ rights.  All you have to do is contact your nearest IWW branch or head on over to https://iww.org/projects/gdc/join.  There you’ll find where to sign up, a directory of established branches and locals, and how to get in touch to start your own GDC Local or International GDC Group if there’s not already one near you!

All the cool kids are doing it.

[solarpunks]

‘Electric mud’ teems with new, mysterious bacteria

The microbiologist had collected black, stinky mud from the bottom of Aarhus Harbor in Denmark, dropped it into big glass beakers, and inserted custom microsensors that detected changes in the mud’s chemistry. At the start of the experiment, the muck was saturated with hydrogen sulfide—the source of the sediment’s stink and color. But 30 days later, one band of mud had become paler, suggesting some hydrogen sulphide had gone missing. Eventually, the microsensors indicated that all of the compound had disappeared. Given what scientists knew about the biogeochemistry of mud, recalls Nielsen, who works at Aarhus University, “This didn’t make sense at all.” The first explanation, he says, was that the sensors were wrong. But the cause turned out to be far stranger: bacteria that join cells end to end to build electrical cables able to carry current up to 5 centimeters through mud. The adaptation, never seen before in a microbe, allows these so-called cable bacteria to overcome a major challenge facing many organisms that live in mud: a lack of oxygen. Its absence would normally keep bacteria from metabolizing compounds, such as hydrogen sulfide, as food. But the cables, by linking the microbes to sediments richer in oxygen, allow them to carry out the reaction long distance.

(via ‘Electric mud’ teems with new, mysterious bacteria | Science | AAAS)

“It was an instruction from Mother Nature to take this more seriously.” “Nanowire bacteria”

[solarpunk-aesthetic]

Moss FM

A radio which uses moss as biological solar panels in plant microbial fuel cells!

[optopia-zine]

Do you make art or write things? Do you have thoughts or feelings about the environment or the planet we live on? So do we! Optopia is looking for visual art, articles, essays, fiction, poetry, and other miscellaneous 2D art forms that approach climate change from a solarpunk perspective.

Keep reading for submission guidelines!

Keep reading

[dry-gold]

No Dig Garden Bed

I put together a no dig raised garden bed yesterday, that I spent zero dollars on, and I’m gonna run you through the process.

I have this spot in the backyard that is half a semicircle of rocks buried in amongst the grass, so this here. First thing was to pull all the rocks out of the grass, we’re gonna use them later.

And then lay out composts and manures and whatever you can get your hands into the size of your bed. How much depends on how much you can get your hands on, just make sure it’s nice and flat on the top. Homemade slow compost or horse manure is great for this because we won’t have to worry about weeds or pumpkins or capsicums growing out of the compost. If you’ve got stables or government paddocks near you, there is probably manure that they’re dying to get rid of.

Here’s the reason we don’t worry about those plants growing up out of it, your layers of cardboard. This acts as a weed matting for anything growing in the compost, as well as anything of the established plants on the site. Get a hold of it however you can, I got this from work. There will be a local business that takes large orders of stock that is drowning in cardboard boxes that you can get a hold of. Make sure you take any plastic tape off too, because it’s going in the soil. It’s a lot easier to take tape off damp cardboard, I let it sit out and wait for it to rain, but soaking it with the hose works too.

Add more cardboard! Cover all those edges, make sure there isn’t any gaps and you have plenty of overlap! It’s the only thing standing between you and a gardenbed full of pernicious grass rhizomes!

Look at the pile of cardboard you still have left and decide that fuck it, you’ll do too more layers of cardboard. It will all break down eventually, and if you do it right you won’t prevent water reaching the soil underneath.

Shingle the cardboard the opposite way to tiles on a roof. Start in the middle and then overlap on top of that as your work your way out. That way instead of the water running all the way to the edge, it runs under the next bit of cardboard and into the soil. If it doesn’t make sense, let me know and I’ll add a diagram.

Border! It keeps your cardboard down! Keeps your mulch in! I used the rocks I dug out and some old bricks that are in a pile around the corner. Get onto gumtree or craigslist or those facebook buynothing groups, someone’s ALWAYS trying to get rid of old tired landscaping rock. You’ll notice that there’s cardboard sticking out the edges, yeah that’s so the weeds aren’t just gonna come straight up through those rocks. It’ll look daggy for a little bit, but it’ll break down pretty quick, especially if you walk on it.

Mulch! Again for free that someone was trying to get rid of. Apparently councils and tree surgeons are always looking to get rid of it but around here everyone has already figured that out so I got this of someone who ordered too much and was trying to get rid of the excess off their driveway.

And we’re done! Don’t plant straight into it if you used a lot of manure, or if you got a ton of weeds there. Let it settle and give the soil critters time to do their work.

I hope this was helpful, if you have any queries hit me up! Have fun and get your hands dirty!

[exigencelost]

If you are finding that prolonged isolation and confinement to a single living space are having a a severely detrimental effect on your mental and physical health, perhaps I can interest you in some PRISON ABOLITION

[probablyasocialecologist]

[veganvenom]

Our current landlady is the very image of one of those landlords who’d be spared the guillotine.

She’s an older, polite, maternal (white, middle class) woman who just happened to have enough money to buy a spare house, and is renting it to top up her pension. She reads The Guardian and asks after my family and does the occasional repair when necessary. She’s not one of those evil landlords.

She also just repeatedly lied to our faces about our contracts to try to get us to forfeit most of the rights we have as tenants. She also visits frequently, criticising how we live and reminding us that our home belongs to her. She also condescendingly and unnecessarily explains to us how boilers and washing machines and carpets work.

She explains to us how renting works.

She explains it with an indulgent smile, like a grandmother talking to a child, as if she’s being terribly patient about correcting our misunderstandings.

And she lies.

She lies because as much as she wants to convince us, everyone else, and even herself that she’s a good person, our entire relationship is based on the power she holds over us. She uses her wealth and position in society to extort payment from us, who have nowhere to live. We sacrifice to her the majority of the income we spend our lives earning, just so we can have a roof over our heads. But any time we don’t show proper deference to her, she could have us out on the street in weeks or months. We’d lose our home, because to her it is merely an asset which in no way belongs to us, the people who live there.

Today she repeatedly lied to us about our contract, and about the law, because she wanted us to have the minimum legal power possible. If I didn’t organise with a local tenants’ union, I wouldn’t have known my rights. And if I didn’t have the security of being a member of that union behind me, I never would have had the guts to challenge her. My housemate had no idea she was lying, and would have trusted her, signing away what few rights we had under the law.

As part of this tenants’ union, I’m always fighting with the worst landlords - the ones who keep people living in squalor, the ones with a dozen properties, the ones who are violent and abusive. But today has reminded me that even the “nice” landlords are still scum.

A genuinely good person who has enough spare money to buy a spare house (which is a lot of money! they wouldn’t need more!) would just let people who need a home live there, not bleed them of their income for the privilege of a warm place to sleep.

Never trust a landlord.

But more importantly, join a tenants’ union, and take back the power they hold over you. It was one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done.

In London, I recommend London Renters Union.

In Scotland: Living Rent.

In the rest of the UK: ACORN.

+ there are tenants’ unions all over the world, and housing co-ops where everyone who lives there part-owns their home and there’s no landlord to answer to

[hex-360a1b]

Here are various links to tenants’ unions and solidarity networks involved in tenant organizing and support around the US:

Nationwide

Homes for All / Hogares Para Todxs [national org, unsure of locals]

California

Tenants Together [statewide]

Alameda Renters Coalition

Berkeley Tenants Union

Center for Community Advocacy [Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties] 

Los Angeles Tenants Union

Isla Vista Tenants Union

Oakland Tenants Union

Pasadena Tenants Union

South Pasadena Tenants Union

San Francisco Tenants Union

Mountain View Tenants Coalition

San Diego Tenants United

Santa Cruz Tenants Association

Protect Culver City Renters

Glendale Tenants Union

Sacramento Tenants Union

Colorado

Colorado Springs Tenants Union

Florida

Miami Tenants Union

Palm Beach County Tenants Union

Georgia

Housing Justice League [Atlanta]

Iowa

Ames Tenants Union

Iowa City Tenants Union

Illinois

Autonomous Tenants Union [Chicago]

Metropolitan Tenants Organization [Chicago]

Indiana

Bloomington Solidarity Network

Louisiana

New Orleans Renters Union

Massachusetts

City Life / Vida Urbana [Jamaica Plain]

Tenant and Housing Association of Worcester

 Springfield: No One Leaves

Minnesota

InquilinXs UnidXs por Justicia (Tenants United for Justice) [Minneapolis]

Mississippi

Cooperation Jackson

Nebraska

Lincoln Tenant Action

Omaha Tenants United

New York

United Tenants of Albany

Crown Heights Tenants Union [Brooklyn]

New Settlement Apartments – Community Action for Safe Apartments [Bronx]

The Greater Syracuse Tenants Network

Oregon

Portland Tenants United

Southern Oregon Tenants Union [Jackson County]

Springfield / Eugene Tenant Association

Pennsylvania

Philadelphia Tenants Union

Pittsburgh Tenants Union

Texas

Texas Tenants Union [Dallas]

Houston Tenants Union

Tenants Union of San Antonio

Virginia

New River Tenants Union [Christianburg]

Washington

Tacoma Tenants Organizing Committee

Tenants Union of Washington State [statewide]

Washington, D.C.

DC Tenants Union

[dysphoricfem-deactivated2020011]

Vermont

Burlington Tenants Union

[catlogicdefiesall]

Northern Territory: https://www.dcls.org.au/tenants-advice/

New South Wales: https://www.tenants.org.au

Queensland: https://tenantsqld.org.au

South Australia: https://www.syc.net.au/home/housing-support/tias/

Tasmania: http://tutas.org.au

Victoria: https://www.tenantsvic.org.au

Western Australia: http://www.tenancywa.org.au

Australian Capital Territory:  http://www.tenantsact.org.au (note, this organisation has been defunded by the ACT government and the website is under maintenance, so they cannot currently offer assistance.)

[layingdownsomebatfeets-deactiva]

Doesn’t this just sum up the landlord-parasite mentality. ‘You shouldn’t get free rent but I should get a free mortgage’. Remarkable. They really don’t see the hypocrisy of expecting someone else to pay their mortgage for them. Because all landlords are selfish greedy immoral bastards and all the bootlickers in the notes can cry about it.

[serialjekyller]

Not to be a fucking nerd or anything but writing academic papers is actually super fun when you have a genuine interest in the topic!

[corvid-shmorvid]

Not to be a fucking nerd or anything but reading academic papers is actually super fun when you have a genuine interest in the topic!

[immortalsins]

Not to be a fucking nerd or anything but finding an academic paper that you don’t have to pay £80 to access is actually super fun when you have a genuine interest in the topic!

[luststarrr]

Not to be a fucking nerd or anything, but finding free academic papers to access is actually super fun, with the help of ResearchGate, when you have a genuine interest in the topic.

Access 130+ million publications and connect with 15+ million researchers. Join for free and gain visibility by uploading your research.

[immortalsins]

Not to be a fucking nerd or anything but that site is super helpful!! And so is Unpaywall which will search for a free version of the paper for you AND it’s super fun when you have a genuine interest in the topic!

https://unpaywall.org/

[lynati]

Also, whether you’re reading and writing academic papers or not, it’s 100% okay to be a nerd!

[arsondotpng]

Not to be a fucking nerd or anything but a lot of the time you can just email the authors of academic papers and they’ll email you a free copy because they make no money from those paywalls, only the journals, and they’re super fun to read when you have a genuine interest in the topic!

[highlights-of-the-lowlife]

I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand ecofascism as a movement. Its not eco activism with a fascist twist. Its fascism wearing the skin of the eco movement because they know people care about the environment and this is a ticket to getting their rhetoric into the mainstream.

The whole point is securing a homeland for their chosen race meaning they have resources for them and theirs. Not save the world, Not protect for the benefit of all. Not even preserve for the sake of the environment. Its all about resources and they will betray every eco tenet once they are no longer useful or get in the way.

People keep saying actions done in the name of ecofascism aren’t truly racist because its about the environment. Thats inherently false. They know they are being racist. They are just trying to dogwhistle it into common knowledge and its working. We need to stop that.

[highlights-of-the-lowlife]

Bringing this back for all the buzz around eco fascism concerning coronavirus. If someone starts advocating the world would be better without humans, they really mean specific kinds of humans.