Though you can take steps to limit their presence, like buying less toxic products and washing your bedding at least once a week, an air filter is probably the best way to breathe cleaner air at night. A new product called the AirTulip Sleep may be the best solution yet, building a high-powered air purification system right into the headboard.

Fluid dynamics and aerodynamics expert Arjen de Jong teamed up with Raoul Valstar to design the AirTulip Sleep in response to COVID-19. The duo wanted to offer advanced air filtration technology in a new form that wouldn’t just take up a bunch of space in the home. The AirTulip Sleep replaces a conventional headboard, directly shielding you from contaminants in your most vulnerable state, and it’s virtually silent to boot.

How the Air Purifying Headboard Works

AirTulip Sleep uses a unique type of airflow to reduce contaminants. Fans, hairdryers, A/C vents, and even the wind spread contaminants through the air in a motion called turbulent airflow. The blowing motion stirs up pollutants and mixes particles and gases with clean air, which makes it hard for most conventional air purifiers to work efficiently.

The AirTulip uses laminar airflow instead, creating a chamber of clean air directly around the headboard where you need it. Laminar airflow is used in hospitals, medical labs, and other scientific facilities that require a sterile environment. The AirTulip Sleep uses it to create an output of clean air without the kind of blowing motion that brings in pollutants from elsewhere in the bedroom.

The product has been tested and verified by the Eindhoven University of Technology, which confirmed that it’s able to reduce the air particle count to zero. The AirTulip sleep also uses Ultra-Low Particulate Air Filters (ULPA) that filter 99.9997 percent of air particles, making it 100 times more efficient than a standard HEPA filter.

Even More Benefits

The AirTulip Sleep is a smart headboard, so you can use the accompanying app to track your sleep quality on your Apple Watch, Fitbit, Oura Ring, or Garmin Fitness Watch. It also offers dual-zone temperature regulations.

The addition of active cooling and heating options on each side of the bed allows you to individually control the temperature between -7 degrees Fahrenheit cooler and +7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the bedroom itself. The laminar flow feature ensures that you won’t feel the temperature difference on the other side of the bed.

Other features include a “day mode” for more powerful air filtration when whisper-quiet operation isn’t as important, a storage shelf along the back for plants or other objects, two integrated wireless smartphone chargers, a reading lamp, a USB charger, and ambient lighting.

How to Order One for Your Home

The AirTulip Sleep comes in all common bed frame sizes, including US twin, full, queen, and king sizes, and European 80/90cm, 140cm, 160cm, and 180cm mattresses. It integrates seamlessly with existing bed frames with the same mounting points. Available colors include mint fabric with a light oak frame, pearl fabric with a birch frame, stone fabric with a titanium-colored frame, and anthracite fabric with a black wood-colored frame.

AirTulip just wrapped up a successful round of crowdfunding on IndieGogo and Kickstarter, with rewards shipping now. It’ll soon be available for retail purchase for $1499 and up; subscribe to the AirTulip newsletter for updates.

The post Air Purifying Headboard Creates a Bubble of Clean Air Around You As You Sleep first appeared on Dornob.

Wastewater management tends to be a big problem in rural India. In villages like Kundli, located on the outskirts of Dehli, hundreds of factories have popped up in a matter of decades, often releasing water contaminated with chemicals directly into the ground. The problem is that these factories, which manufacture items like plastics, rubber, jewelry, and polyester, typically don’t have enough space for high-tech water treatment solutions, even if they could afford them. The pollutants in turn make their way into groundwater and nearby waterways, contaminating the local bathing and drinking water.

The Indus tile system’s algae-based bioremediation process involves placing a wastewater tank on top of the building and then allowing gravity to funnel the water though “veins” in the “leaves.” The designers traveled to India and observed the production processes of textile dyers in Panipat and bangle makers in Kolkata, where various processes release different types of heavy metals into the wastewater. The team found that one particular type of algae was able to reduce cadmium levels in the water by 10 times within 45 minutes.

Fabricated in Khurja, India, which is known for its ceramics, the Indus tiles are made of clay and deeply textured to hold onto a viscous hydrogel containing the most promising pollution-busting species of algae. The vein-like channels are shaped by an algorithm to optimize their ability to absorb pollutants. As the water flows over a tile, the microscopic algae cells absorb and store the substances for energy. The hydrogel acts as a “biological scaffold” that keeps the algae alive, and it’s biodegradable. The materials required to prepare the hydrogel and algae cells can be supplied in a powdered form and reapplied to the tiles as needed.

The modular tiles fit together into a beautiful pattern using half-lap joints, so individual tiles can be replaced as necessary without disassembling the entire wall. This also makes it easy to scale the wall size up or down, tailoring it to each site. In the future, the designers hope to integrate a second phase in which the saturated hydrogel packed with heavy metals is removed and sold to high-tech companies, which can use the metals in their own manufacturing processes. The Indus tiles are set to undergo performance tests in the UK and then a pilot project in India itself.

The creators imagine adapting Indus wall tiles to different regions and needs, making them from local materials like stone or even waste materials. Different tiles could be tailored to different pollutants, infused with the particular type of algae that works best in that context. Given that the end result is so beautiful, it’s not hard to imagine the concept extending to residential applications, too. Just imagine installing a wall of these at the edge of your own roof instead of a gutter, cleaning rainwater for personal use later on.

The post Leaf-Shaped Wall Tiles Full of Living Algae Absorb Pollutants from Rainwater first appeared on Dornob.

What will characterize our own time on Earth? Sadly, it seems like the most enduring thing we’ll leave behind is trillions of plastic particles that will still be present in every corner of the globe 1,000 years from now. London architecture firm Vatraa makes this point in vivid fashion with “The Plastic Monument,” a roughly 21-foot-tall Stonehenge replica standing in a plaza in southern Milan. Winner of National Geographic’s 2019 “Planet or Plastic” design competition, the sculpture is made out of 16,000 recycled plastic bottles.

“Taking the form of a trilithon, one of the oldest forms of structure inherited from our ancestors, the monument draws the attention to the consequences of our actions in the long run, to the fact that what we are doing today might stay on Earth forever,” say the architects. “The installation poses a stark contrast between a single-use, disposable material and the eternity of the trilithon. Made of pressed PET bottle bales — the raw material for the plastic recycling plants – it educates the public into the recycling process by illustrating its first steps, just before the material is shredded, washed, and melted into new bottles.”

Thousands of crushed bottles are held together in three stone slab-like rectangular shapes made of wire mesh, making it clear that the “monument” is made of single-use plastic trash. It sits on two solid steel blocks as a foundation and stands just slightly smaller than the real Stonehenge. That enables it to stand up to strong winds — and be disassembled for display in other cities in the future.

“When we think of what our ancestors left to us, we think of real assets made of brick or stone, like the pyramids, the Colosseum, or Stonehenge,” says Bogdan Rusu, founding partner at Vatraa. “But part of our legacy to the next generation might also be plastic waste…Hundreds of years down the line our great-great-great grandchildren might find disposable plastic items that we just got rid of today because it was so convenient to us.”

If you find that to be a depressing thought, then the monument has done its job. Whether our actual contemporary architectural creations someday become their own “ancient monuments” may not matter. Even if humanity survives the coming climate catastrophe, future generations will likely think of us in terms of the pollution we contributed to the planet rather than our more admirable achievements.

The Plastic Monument will remain on display in Milan until next October, when Vatraa hopes it will embark upon a world tour to spread awareness about the consequences of our collective actions.

The post Plastic Monument: Stonehenge Recreated in Milan Using 16,000 Discarded Bottles first appeared on Dornob.

Currently wrapping up a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, the Shelfy sort of looks like a misplaced Apple device. It’s a minimalist white pod that you tuck onto one of your refrigerator shelves to let it do its magic. Taking up less space than a gallon of milk, the Shelfy extends shelf life up to 12 days, reduces bad odors by 80 percent, and results in up to 10 times less bacterial load inside the refrigerator.

To use it, you just select the mode you want (eco, standard, or boost); place it in the fridge wherever it fits best, including in a drawer or door; and reap the benefits. Shelfy’s makers claim the device can keep some vegetables like zucchini good for as long as 22 days, and extend the lives of fast-rotting foods like strawberries by up to a week.

Food waste is a major contributor to environmental crises like climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, requiring tons of resources and land to grow food that people don’t end up eating (and emitting methane gases when it rots). A single family spends an average of almost $2,000 a year on food that they end up throwing away. Shelfy cites studies that show one out of every two refrigerators has an above-average proliferation of mold and bacteria, contributing to the problem.

The Shelfy uses an advanced ceramic filter, a silent fan, and a battery to take in air inside the refrigerator through mechanical ventilation, passing it through a photocatalytic filter that destroys pollutants. After a while, it’ll notify you that it’s time to remove the filter and wash it under running water, or charge it via a USB-C plug. You can control it with the Vitesy Hub app and connect it to Amazon Alexa and Google Home via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The Shelfy also monitors your refrigerator’s energy consumption based on how many times you open the door.

The designers explain that they “conducted research at CSI SpA – FPM Laboratory (Food Packaging Materials), an Italian and European technological hub with a team of about 400 experts including engineers, physicists, chemists,and microbiologists who have made quality, safety, and sustainability the backbone of their professional role. They’re recognized as a center of excellence, especially for companies in the food, packaging, construction, and automotive sectors, in which every day, for more than 25 years, they have been working to enhance quality companies and protect the market.”

“Shelfy uses an innovative and sustainable nanomaterial-based photocatalytic technology since the filter doesn’t need to be replaced, just washed under running water. Photocatalysis is a safe chemical reaction that absorbs air pollutants and turns them into harmless elements. The use of this technology guarantees safety, better performance, and less consumption. In this way, we make Vitesy technology sustainable and effective.”

If you missed the Shelfy’s Kickstarter campaign, you’ll be able to pick one up soon for the retail price of €169 (about $175).

The post Fight Food Waste in Your Fridge with the Shelfy Smart Purifier first appeared on Dornob.

“It’s well known that we have a problem with plastics in the environment,” says Mackintosh. “We face the challenges of figuring out ways to reduce and prevent it as well as clean up the water that’s already out there.”

Held by the University of Surrey, the brand new public competition solicited entries from anyone who had an idea for a bio-inspired robot. Mackintosh’s proposal was a simple drawing showing how the robot fish could swim through the water, its internal cavity opening and then compressing to force water over the gills in order to collect plastic particles. The winning entry was selected and built by a group of senior engineers and scientists with years of experience bringing robotic concepts to life.

“We don’t know where the vast majority of the plastic that enters our waters ends up,” says Dr. Robert Siddall, lecturer at the University of Surrey and initiator of the competition. “We hope that this robo-fish and its future offspring will be the first steps in the right direction to help us find and eventually control this plastic pollution problem.”

The roboticists assisting with the competition turned Mackintosh’s proposal into a remote-controlled robot about the size of a salmon. It swims by flapping its tail while keeping its mouth wide open to collect water (and microplastics) in its internal cavity. Once the cavity is full, the robot closes its mouth and opens its lamellar gill valves, pushing the water out of the valves and lifting the bottom of the cavity. Its features include pectoral fins, a gill and mouth motor, a gill raker, particulate mesh, a separate motor for the fins, a tail fin actuation rod, a tail fin motor, battery and microcontroller, and sensors that detect light levels and turbidity (clarity) of the water.

You can now make your very own Gillbert Robo-Fish, as the plans for the current iteration of the design are available as free, open-source CAD files on GrabCad.com. Future revisions will make the fish autonomous instead of remote-controlled so they can be deployed in groups. The public is encouraged to make their own changes and improvements as they experiment with the design.

Other entries in the 2022 Natural Robotics Contest included a forest-protecting robot bird, a hermit crab rover, a robotic sea urchin, and a plastic-collecting dolphin. You can see them all and apply for next year’s contest at the Natural Robotics Contest website.

“We chose Eleanor’s both because we really liked the idea and the way it used bioinspiration, but also because cleaning up ocean plastic was the most common purpose among all the entries we received, so we thought our winner should reflect that,” Siddall told FOX Weather.

The post Gillbert the Robot Fish Sucks Up Microplastics in the Water as It Swims first appeared on Dornob.

“The fashion industry produces 10 percent of humanity’s carbon emissions and creates a huge amount of pollution in the process of making textiles,” Holloway explains, adding: “By contrast, this project explores the promising possibility of root-grown textiles and imagines compostable and sustainable fashion. As fashions change, new clothes grow and old clothes are composted. Grown from root, inspired by marine life.”

Rootfull takes advantage of overlooked materials that exist literally right beneath our feet. Certain grasses grow roots that can reach over a dozen feet down into the Earth. Even common Bermuda grass, found in most lawns, has roots measuring eight feet. Holloway used wheatgrass for the series, cultivating the seed in templates carved from beeswax. Roots naturally grow into mesh-like structures, but Holloway guided them into templates over a 12-day growing period to get the shapes she wanted.

“The challenge is to sew, cut, tease, join, pluck, set, and reset until the root has found the optimal form,” Holloway writes. “Root is an exciting and versatile material where the most honest results are achieved by working with the natural flows of the fiber. It can be grown into large hanging structures or set and molded to form vessels, and it responds especially well to natural dying processes.”

“When freshly harvested, the roots are heavy and damp, and after 24 hours they dry out to become featherweight, and strong enough to support their own weight. The root forms a kind of botanical skeleton, trapping carbon, and therefore becomes a tiny part of the solution to the complex problem of climate change.”

Because of the nature of living materials, each piece in the collection is entirely unique, even if the same beeswax templates are used. In a sense, Holloway collaborated with Mother Nature herself, guiding the wheatgrass roots to produce visually interesting results. She’s even able to grow the roots into large mats much like a bolt of fabric so they can then be shaped into beautiful dresses. The silhouettes they achieve are truly remarkable, demonstrating the kind of creativity that’s possible when we stop limiting ourselves to harmful polluting materials simply because that’s what we’re used to using.

Holloway’s non-wearable Rootfull pieces have their own sense of natural elegance. Some of them really do resemble coral and sea fans, so why shouldn’t we display these in our home instead of contributing to the many threats to coral reefs? The pieces are also gorgeous as lampshades, with the light bringing out the intricacy of the woven patterns.

The post Zena Holloway Weaves Living Plant Roots into High Fashion Outfits first appeared on Dornob.

“Like air taking shape uniquely within our bodies, our lives, and the world around us, this installation changes shape based on real-time, region-specific data as an abstract representation of how air quality impacts us all differently,” the creators explain.

“This interactive installation encourages its audience to reflect on their personal relationship to air quality both locally and globally. It also evokes a lasting, emotional response for those living with the greatest consequences of air pollution through the shared experience of a simple act — breathing.”

The kinetic structures change shape in response to data from local sensors and global data from an open-source API. Audiences who gather to watch the installations will be instructed to follow the breathing pattern of the structure, breathing in with every expansion and out with every contraction to see what it feels like to breathe the air in a particular location.

They’ll even be able to select a region of interest to control the installation’s movements. A QR code will lead the audience to an educational website offering more information and actions to take in their daily lives to reduce global air pollution.

Atta Society aims to deploy the first edition of the “When Air Takes Shape” installation in summer 2023 at various locations within British Columbia. In the future, they plan to take the installation around the world. Their recent Kickstarter campaign raised 214 percent of their goal with the support of 95 backers. They’ve already created their preliminary designs and prototypes, and the funds raised will be used to construct the final sculptures and deploy them in public.

“Within the current climate emergency, human livelihoods are at stake,” the creators say. “Those in less developed regions are especially vulnerable to environmental crises. As far as our world is from being a collection of isolated utopias, many privileged individuals do not understand the urgency, or possess the knowledge, to act upon climate change.”

“However, our consumption demands can increase the risks of individuals dying from air pollution in other parts of the world. As an alarming example, U.S. consumption is responsible for about 100,000 deaths occurring elsewhere in the world. Of those deaths, about 50 percent occur in China, with another 20 percent occurring elsewhere in Asia. Yet, consumerism persists, paralleled with the exploitation of individuals and the environment.”

The “When Air Takes Shape” project makes air pollution feel more personal, wherever you may live in the world. To follow this project and watch for future exhibitions, follow the Atta Society on Instagram @attasociety and on Facebook.

The post Shapeshifting Sculptures Show the Harsh Reality of Air Pollution first appeared on Dornob.

Whether it’s trash, treasure, or sunken historical cargo washing up on sandy shores around the world, there’s no doubt that what’s been washing up on the Texas Coastal Bend is undoubtedly the creepiest of them all: sand and debris-encrusted plastic dolls that would give even horror movie veteran Chucky a run for his money.

While the area, which is around 30 miles northeast of Corpus Christi, is no stranger to trash washing up onshore due to a “loop current” that pushes debris toward the area, these dolls are reoccurring visitors that are exceedingly unsettling. Often dismembered and deformed from their travels, some might even call them the stuff of nightmares.

Twice a week, researchers at the Mission-Arkansas Reserve at the University of Texas trawl the stretch of coast between Padre Island and Matagorda Island looking for wildlife like sea turtles, marine mammals, and even endangered bird species. What they often find instead is all the trash that washes ashore, including the uber-creepy dolls that have been showing their distorted and maniacal little faces for years now.

The dolls specifically seem to be drawn to the area. Haunted? Unlikely. A result of the area’s current washing up excess debris from Mexico? Probably. Jace Tunnell, the Director of the Mission-Arkansas Reserve, says: “Texas coastal bend beaches get ten times the amount of trash than any other beach in the Gulf of Mexico,” and this is perhaps why the dolls are so prevalent. However, this entirely scientific reasoning certainly does not detract from the eeriness of the dolls themselves — after all, the current explains the trash and debris, but what explains the dolls themselves?

While the researchers don’t have answers to this creepy conundrum, they do find it amusing, and even, as Tunnell has said, a “perk” of the job, posting images of the distorted dollies on a social media account that’s gone on to garner a cult following. “Everyday is something new,” he told McClatchy News. “Just when you think you’ve found everything that could possibly wash up on shore, something else comes up.”

If you find yourself on this lovely corner of Texas coast, don’t be surprised if you see the occasional deranged looking doll on the beach. They may not be haunted, but they’re certainly more evidence of the appallingly polluted state of our oceans.

The post Why Do These Deformed Dolls Keep Washing Up on the Texas Coastline? first appeared on Dornob.

Dyson engineers spent six years developing more than 500 prototypes that transformed the company’s air filtration technology into a compact wearable unit. The product evolution began as a hilariously bulky design with a snorkel-like mouthpiece, which was eventually refined to its final form: fairly standard-looking over-the-ear headphones with the face visor attached. The visor might appear slightly claustrophobic, but it doesn’t actually touch the wearer’s face, hovering far enough away for proper air circulation.

The compressors in each ear cup draw air through dual-layer filters and project two streams of purified air to the wearer’s nose and mouth through the visor. Sculpted air returns ensure that you’re breathing purified air that is diluted as little as possible by external crosswinds. To test the filtration, Dyson engineers used a breathing mannequin with medical-grade mechanical lungs and sensing equipment, which they placed in a controlled chamber full of air pollution.

The mannequin “breathed” through the Dyson Zone, and then the contents of its lungs were tested to see how much pollution made it through, with results showing that the filters are at least 97 percent effective. The filtration consists of negatively charged electrostatic filter media to trap ultra fine particles like allergens, brake dust, industry combustion and construction-related pollution, while a potassium-enriched carbon layer captures common urban gas pollutants like NO2 and SO2.

The Dyson Zone is designed for comfort, taking inspiration from the shape of a horse’s saddle to distribute weight over the sides of the head rather than the top. A custom blend of different types of foam makes the ear cup and headband cushions soft, stable, and capable of blocking out external sound. Which brings us, at long last, to the quality that’s most important in a pair of headphones: the audio.

The Zone has three different modes for noise cancellation. Raising the face visor turns on isolation mode, with active noise cancelling to eliminate distractions. When you lower the visor, you activate conversation mode, disabling noise cancellation. Transparency mode is somewhere in between, filtering most noises but allowing important sounds like car horns and sirens to come through. Dyson says the Zone delivers immersive high-fidelity sound, so you can listen to music as it was meant to be heard wherever you go.

Is anyone actually going to wear these? That remains to be seen when they become available this fall. For one thing, they’re quite large and look fairly heavy. They’re also impossible to ignore. Early adopters would have to be willing to withstand a lot of weird looks in public at a time when mask wearing has become politicized and equated to being silenced (at least in the United States). But it’s also possible that all the mask wearing of the last few years will actually reduce some resistance to a product like this, and personal air filtration will become the norm. Call us crazy, but we kind of wish we could just cut down air pollution in general and skip the bulky wearables altogether.

The post Zone: Dyson’s Weird New Headphones Include an Air-Filtering Face Visor first appeared on Dornob.

For us, that has mostly been a good thing, but the convenience has come with a lot of downsides — especially for other species. A new exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany examines our fascination with artificial light and the negative effects associated with its permanent and excessive use. Entitled “Power! Light!,” the exhibition features over 80 works of light art by 60 internationally renowned artists, each one offering enlightenment about issues like light pollution, environmental side effects, and even the ways in which light can be used politically.

Curators Andreas Beitin and Holger Broeker and junior curators Elena Engelbrechter and Regine Epp have brought together works that address how light is used to offer social space and protection or showcase people and objects, but also to monitor, manipulate, exclude, and even destroy. Light has also enabled incredible global economic and cultural development, and led to the destruction of nature.

The museum’s official website explains: “Current issues surrounding ecology are addressed in works of light art such as Nana Petzet’s “Light Trap Hamburg” (2015/2018), which focuses on the mass decline of insect populations. With the help of an algorithm, Daniel Canogar’s “Troposphere” (2017) translates data of global environmental phenomena and natural disasters into abstract color animations. The extent to which we are all trained and manipulated by advertising is demonstrated by Monica Bonvicini’s aesthetic and yet forbidding neon sign “NOT FOR YOU” (2006), as well as by Daniel Pflumm’s light boxes, in which it is unmistakable, even without the company lettering, which firm is behind the brightly colored message.”

“Questions regarding romanticism, happiness, and utopias arise in Lori Hersberger’s “Sunset 164” (2006), in which colorful neon arches feign an eternal sunset — a state that is neither day nor night and quickly ends in the beauty of mere superficial appearance. And do you remember the last time you looked up at a clear, star-filled sky? Siegrun Appelt’s installation, created especially for the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, draws attention to the widespread light pollution by allowing light to be physically experienced in an extremely concentrated form.”

Other works include Gregor Schneider’s “High Security and Isolation Cell No.2” (2005), an interactive experience referencing permanent exposure to a light source as a form of torture, and Warren Neidich’s neon installation “Pizzagate Neon” (2016), addressing the politically motivated fake news scandal in which conspiracy theorists accused Hillary Clinton and other democrats of running a child sex trafficking ring out of the non-existent basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. Artists displaying works also include Olafur Eliasson, Maja Bajevic, Damien Hirst, Lori Hersberger, Tatsuo Miyajima, and more.

Power! Light! will be on display through July 10th, 2022. Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is a contemporary art museum and cultural center established in 1994 known for its extensive collections, beautiful glass-roofed space, and Japanese garden.

The post Light Art Gets Political at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg’s New 60-Artist Exhibition in Germany first appeared on Dornob.

The team, led by Yushan Yan, a professor at the university, and Henry Belin du Pont, Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has spent the last 15 years searching for a way to eliminate the CO2 problem in the fuel cells. In a paper released in the journal Nature, they explained how their problem might actually be a solution to drastically reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That means it has serious climate change-fighting potential.

“Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side,” says Brian Setzler, Assistant Professor for Research in Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering.

The team leveraged this “self-purging” ability to create a carbon dioxide separator that could be placed upstream from their fuel cell stacks. “It turns out our approach is very effective,” Yan says. “We can capture 99 percent of the carbon dioxide out of the air in one pass if we have the right design and the right configuration.”

This was achieved by a somewhat risky process of embedding the power source for the electrochemical technology inside the separation membrane, which involved internally short-circuiting the device. “And by using this internal electrically shorted membrane, we were able to get rid of the bulky components, such as bipolar plates, current collectors, or any electrical wires typically found in a fuel cell stack,” says Lin Shi, a doctoral candidate in the Yan group and the paper’s lead author.

This short-cut makes it easier for the carbon dioxide particles to travel from one side of the device to the other, and allows the team to pack the whole thing into a smaller package capable of filtering greater quantities of air at a time. Their first prototype, about the size of a soda can, was designed to scrub CO2 from a vehicle’s exhaust. It’s capable of filtering about 10 liters of air per minute and removing about 98 percent of CO2.

A second, smaller version measuring 2 by 2 inches can continuously remove about 99 percent of carbon dioxide in air flowing at a rate of two liters per minute. The device can also be scaled up as necessary for larger applications, like on aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines. Though the researchers don’t say as much, that seems to open up the potential for after-market emissions-reducing devices on existing vehicles powered by fossil fuels. After all, these vehicles aren’t just going to disappear once electric cars become more standard.

While this is all great news, some scientists are urging us not to get too excited. Carbon capture alone isn’t enough to avert the climate crisis, and it would be easy to use this breakthrough as an excuse to slow the transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies. At the end of the day, we need a multi-pronged approach if we’re going to avoid total catastrophe in the not-so-distant future.

The post Scientists Accidentally Found a Way to Clean 99% of CO2 Out of the Air first appeared on Dornob.

“For IKEA, the smart home is not about gadgets. It’s about making life and home better through combining our solid home furnishing knowledge with digital solutions and technology,” says Henrik Telander, Product Owner at IKEA of Sweden, adding that “That’s why we explore the possibility of integrating the function of purifying air and technology to provide good experiences for customers at home. STARKVIND is a high-performing air purifier. When designing it, we also wanted it to have a modern design which can be adapted to changing lifestyles. People can choose based on their needs and preference.”

Available in a blonde wood or dark brown-black finish, the $189 STARKVIND air purifier table features a three-filter system with a pre-filter to eliminate big particles like hair and dust, a finer particle filter to capture 99.5 percent of smaller airborne particles like pollen, and a gas cleaning filter for odors and pollutants like formaldehyde and other VOCs. It does have physical knobs, though, so it can be used with or without the $35 TRADFRI smart home gateway, which gives you the ability to control it from your smartphone. Even without the smart capabilities, you can choose between five fan speeds or select “Auto “mode, which uses a built-in air sensor to adjust the speed based on the air quality in the room.

The STARKVIND air filter is also available in freestanding form, if that’s what you’d prefer, at a lower price point of $129. That model looks sort of like a circular floor fan, sitting on two triangular legs. Yet another option is the $59.99 FÖRNUFTIG air purifier, a more compact 12 x 18-inch gadget that can either be placed on the floor with an included stand or hung on the wall vertically or horizontally. No word just yet on the cost of STARKVIND replacement filters, but they’ll probably be fairly similar to the ones for the FÖRNUFTIG, which range from $5.99 to $12.99. All three options are expected to become available at IKEA stores worldwide in October 2021.

Back in July, IKEA released the $199 SYMFONISK picture frame and $189 SYMFONISK table lamp with built-in Wi-Fi speakers as part of their collaboration with electronics brand Sonos. Both items really level up the ability to disguise speakers as decor instead of just dealing with how ugly they usually are. The table lamp combines two functions to save space and looks cool, too, but the new picture frame is extra handy thanks to its compact dimensions. Measuring 16 X 22 inches with a depth of just two, the picture frame speaker can hang flat on a wall and even be paired with an LED light panel to create a unique light and sound experience. Both speakers are available in light and dark colors, can be grouped together for fuller sound, and connect with all major music streaming subscription services.

If there’s one caveat to these new IKEA offerings, it’s the fact that they really only blend into homes with modern decor, so hopefully more manufacturers will start offering gadgets like these in the near future.

The post New IKEA STARKVIND Air Purifier Disguises Itself as Furniture first appeared on Dornob.

The environmental impact of plastic is well-known. If not recycled, it pollutes our neighborhoods, oceans, and the world around us. With this work, the trio hopes to illustrate how we use and misuse plastic, where it goes, and where it ultimately ends up (most times, in the ocean).

Color coding the trash into categories further emphasizes how humans misuse plastics. The white portion of the sculpture in particular shows that first-use plastics are discarded a whopping 60 percent of the time, whether in landfills, unmanaged in the overall landscape of our planet, or by making its inevitable journey into our oceans.

But that’s not the only data visible on the sculpture. There are also other colors that represent the complicated journey that plastics often take through our global waste stream. For example, green represents recycled plastics, red represents incinerated plastics, and blue shows plastics still in use. The width of each stream is proportionate to its statistical number, but it’s the black stream that’s truly the most alarming here, as it’s meant to reflect all the plastic ever produced since 1950: a whopping 8.3 billion metric tons, all for human use and consumption.

By using plastic collected by 50 volunteers on the Bali beach with the goal of finding the appropriate colors, the creators hoped to shift perspectives. Rather than collecting garbage, they were meant to be collecting and curating the pieces with the goal of taking “creative action.” As artist Liina Klauss (one of the three masterminds behind the project) says, “Science gives us new knowledge about the world. Art gives us new perspectives how to see the world. [And] merging the two has tremendous power.”

Klauss began the vision for the impactful sculpture about ten years ago, in 2011. When she was living in Hong Kong, she gained a deeper understanding of how plastic pollution impacts our planet, and how statement-making art can build awareness. Making Indonesia her second home only served as a catalyst for ultimately producing this colorfully impactful piece on the beach in Bali.

The latest sculpture is just one of the many pieces Klauss has created in the intervening decade, effectively turning “rubbish into rainbows.” On her coastal walks, she has found everything from medical waste to refrigerators washed up on the beach, using all of it in her more than 50 art installations across Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan. All are colorful and use the beach as a canvas — the perfect way to illustrate how plastic devastates our coasts, our oceans, and our planet.

Klauss says, “All over the world on remote beaches, plastic pollution has become insane normality or normal insanity.” By creating her sculptures, she hopes to raise awareness and change people’s perceptions — and maybe even their habits. Look for Klauss’ “Perpetual Plastic” on the big screen when it debuts later this year as a short film by director Eric Ebner.

The post Bali’s “Perpetual Plastic” Sculpture is (Literally) Trash first appeared on Dornob.

Every month, 129 billion disposable masks are used and thrown away around the world. They’re an environmental disaster in their own right, especially the surgical kind made of polypropylene plastic. For starters, birds get their legs tangled in the elastic straps and sea creatures mistake them for food. Then as they break down into micro-plastics, they pollute waterways, and eventually our drinking water. But unfortunately for us all, they’re also a crucial part of combating the coronavirus.

Reusable fabric masks are a better choice, and at the very least, governments could be educating the public about how to dispose of them and coordinating mass clean-up campaigns. In the meantime, one South Korean furniture designer has an idea for making use of all the waste. With “Stack and Stack,” Haneul Kim transforms thousands of used disposable masks into colorful stools in white, blue, pink, black, and multicolored palettes.

“The disposable mask consists of a plastic (PP) material, melt blow filter, and spun-bond,” Kim writes on Instagram. “I make a chair-shaped module that melts, cools, and hardens the plastic mask. Thousands of masks, which were this thin fabric, combine together and finally have the durability of a hard, tough plastic. I hope that the curiosity of recycling masks will not stop at the object of chairs, but will be the possibility to inform the seriousness of environmental pollution and solve the problem.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CI2kTK-lMl2/

Kim breaks down the process in a series of Instagram posts, including how the masks were melted down into polypropylene globs and formed into various shapes. Experimental discs demonstrate the effects of mixing different colors of masks together with interesting dappled results. Each stool also has three legs which are constructed separately from the seat and then formed together with hot plastic and clamps. The results are certainly a little rough around the edges, but you can see how a little polish could make them resemble something you’d see for sale at a place like IKEA.

Finding a new purpose for used, bacteria-laden masks may strike you as a gross and potentially dangerous task, but there’s no need to worry about the finished stools being contaminated. Setting up a mask collection box at his school, the Kaywon University of Art and Design in Uiwang city, Kim gathered 10,000 used masks from his peers, along with more than a ton of defective masks straight from a factory. He then kept them in storage for at least four days to reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission, removed all the elastic bands and wires, and used a heat gun to melt them within shaping molds. Trust us: the temperatures it reaches of over 570 degrees Fahrenheit are more than enough to kill any microbes present.

The 18-inch-tall stools went on display at Kim’s graduation exhibition, and he plans to expand “Stack and Stack” to additional furniture pieces like chairs, tables, and lamps in the future. Hopefully, this project will inspire others to find new uses for this newly ubiquitous litter, or at least encourage people to properly dispose of their old face masks.

The post Thousands of Used Disposable Face Masks Transformed into Colorful Stools first appeared on Dornob.

Right now, autonomous solar-powered vessels called Interceptors are doing just that. Created by nonprofit organization The Ocean Cleanup, these “floating garbage trucks” are designed to scoop waste out of rivers using a long floating boom. The Interceptors are anchored to the riverbed, and plastic trash guided into openings on their fronts is loaded onto a conveyor belt that in turn collects it into bins. When those bins are full, sensors notify local operators, who empty and replace them, and send the waste to local facilities for processing.

This automation is part of what makes the project so promising. The system is highly efficient, already having proven effective at fishing micro-plastics as small as a millimeter in size out of the water. After testing the first design, the Interceptor 1.0, The Ocean Cleanup’s engineers developed a new model with simpler parts, the ability to collect larger volumes of litter, and greater stability in the water, protecting against accidental spills.

Video of the Interceptor at work in Malaysia shows just how well it does its job. An astonishing amount of trash passes over the conveyor belt almost constantly, including cups, straws, packaging, and even shoes. The trash collectors operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, extracting over 110,000 pounds (50,000 kilograms) each day. Catching all of this manmade debris before it reaches the oceans solves a critical problem with ocean cleanup that occurs in the actual oceans: accidentally capturing marine life along with all the trash.

Three Interceptors are already in place in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Dominican Republic, with a fourth set to be installed in Vietnam early next year. The Ocean Cleanup hopes to tackle the 1,000 most polluting rivers worldwide within a five-year period, with an ultimate goal of removing 90 percent of all floating plastic by the year 2040. They’re working with manufacturers around the world to roll out more Interceptors, and constantly refining new generations of the design using what already they’ve learned.

Recycling the plastic it recovers from waterways is an essential part of The Ocean Cleanup’s vision. In October 2019, the project made its first foray to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and while hiccups and delays prompted a redesign and redeployment in 2020, the barriers are successfully gathering trash that’s now being transformed into products like sunglasses designed by Yves Béhar.

“100 percent of the proceeds from the sales of these sunglasses will go directly to continued cleanup operations. When we return to the patch, because of your support, we estimate that we can clean an area equivalent to 24 football fields of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch from the proceeds of just one pair of sunglasses. If we sell every pair, that means we could clean half a million football fields worth of ocean.”

If all of this already sounds familiar to you, that’s probably because the concept existed before The Ocean Cleanup’s Interceptors came along. In Baltimore, a trash-eating barge called Mr. Trash Wheel has been in operation since 2008 using almost the exact same process, but with the fun addition of googly eyes.

The post Autonomous Solar-Powered “Floating Garbage Trucks” Scoop Trash Out of Rivers first appeared on Dornob.

Biotech firm Loop is concerned that today’s corpse disposal techniques have been working against nature for too long, polluting air, water, and natural biodiversity along the way. “Contrary to nature’s beautiful end-of-life cycle, people are not only parasitizing during life, but even after death they leave a scar on this beautiful planet,” the company website says. “Thanks to our modern lifestyle, the average human body contains 219 chemicals that can endanger ecosystems.”

A customary burial today includes embalming fluid, which leaks noxious compounds into the ground — not to mention the fact that conventional caskets alone use up an incredible amount of resources. The Berkeley Planning Journal estimates that the amount of wood used for coffins in the US every year tears down 4 million acres of forest and could be used to create 4.5 million homes. Cremation isn’t much better, either, as it sends carbon monoxide, fine soot, sulfur dioxide, and heavy metals into the atmosphere.

“It’s as if we see ourselves as waste, while we can be a valuable part of nature,” says Loop founder Bob Hendrikx, who first got the idea for a greener burial while showcasing his living home concept at the 2019 Dutch Design Week. If an organic material could house the living, he wondered, why couldn’t it encase the dead as well?

From those musings was born the company’s eco-friendly “Living Cocoon.” Working with the Delft University of Technology and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Loop has constructed these caskets from mycelium, an “underground fungal network [that connects] the roots of plants to form ‘Nature’s Internet.’” In other words, the coffin recycles organic matter into essential elements for new plant life. The bottom is even lined with a mossy bed, and the entire space is inhabited by helpful bacteria colonies.

The caskets are lab-grown in one week by combining mycelium with an organic wood chip substrate. The mycelium then eats through the substrate, growing to fill a coffin-shaped mold. It’s a method that’s especially easy on the environment, as it requires no outside heat, light, or energy. When all’s said and done, the case goes through a drying process, after which it’s strong enough to hold up to 440 pounds.

Loop asserts that the Living Cocoon will biodegrade within 45 days, with bodies being fully composted in three years. In a traditional coffin, the process would take 10 to 20 years.

“When the Living Cocoon is in the ground you can even water it, add seeds, and decide what tree you want to become,” says Hendrikx.

Not only can humans be turned into compost faster with these mushroom-based boxes, but they can also help purify the ground where they are interred, since mycelium is an excellent destroyer of toxins. “It’s used in Chernobyl to clean up the soil there from the nuclear disaster,” Hendrikx notes, adding that “the same thing happens in our burial places, because the soil is super polluted there and mycelium really likes metals, oils, and microplastics.”

Hendrikx and his Loop team would love to see their Living Cocoon be a means of decontamination all over the planet. “We have a dream of having super-new natural funeral-based concepts in which we go to different cities and search for the dirtiest soil and start cleaning that up,” he says.

Loop’s living coffins are available for purchase in the Netherlands for around 1,500 euros each. The company has sold 10 to date, with one already having been used for an interment in the Hague.

The post Loop’s “Living Cocoon” Coffins Make Death Eco-Friendly first appeared on Dornob.