New device harnesses the Sun's power to produce clean water.

Jonathan Liow with his invention.

Harnessing the power of the sun, an Australian university graduate has designed a simple, sustainable and affordable water-purification device with the potential to help eradicate disease and save lives.

The Solarball, developed as Jonathan Liow’s final-year project during his Bachelor of Industrial Design course at Monash University in Australia, can produce up to three litres of clean water every day. The spherical unit absorbs sunlight and causes dirty water contained inside to evaporate. As evaporation occurs, contaminants are separated from the water, generating drinkable condensation. The condensation is collected and stored, ready for drinking.

Liow says his design was driven by a need to help the 900 million people around the world who lack access to safe drinking water. Over two million children die each year from preventable causes, triggered largely by contaminated water. It is an increasing problem in developing nations due to rapid urbanisation and population growth.

The Solarball could change lives.

“After visiting Cambodia in 2008, and seeing the immense lack of everyday products we take for granted, I was inspired to use my design skills to help others,” Liow explains. His simple but effective design is user-friendly and durable, with a weather-resistant construction, making it well suited to people in hot, wet, tropical climates with limited access to resources.

“The challenge was coming up with a way to make the device more efficient than other products available, without making it too complicated, expensive, or technical,” Liow says.

Source: Monash University

PM whisky tasting, courtesy of Bunnahabhain

Aaaah... now that's a whisky! The occasion was a Popular Mechanics whisky tasting event for readers at a rather appealing bar-restaurant in Bree Street, Cape Town, called French Toast. Our host was  larger-than-life Pierre Meintjes - regional director (Africa) for CL World Brands, South Africa's only Keeper of the Quaich (pronounced "quake"), and a raconteur of note.

The man in our picture is Louis van der Berg, who walked off with a bottle of Bunnahabhain 18-year-old worth R750 (when we say walked off, we don't mean he pinched it... he actually won the bottle in a lucky draw). If the image looks a little dodgy, it's partly because the lighting was bad, but also because it was captured on the cellphone of PM editor Alan Duggan during a particularly emotional moment (someone had just offered to top up his glass). Thanks to the wonders of modern communications technology, it was live on this site within 90 seconds.

Pierre Meintjes, South Africa's sole Keeper of the Quaich.

Thanking Pierre for his illuminating presentation, Alan said some people might be inclined to question the connection between a science and technology brand and a single-malt whisky. "That's a no-brainer... our audience wants to know how and why things work, and that's exactly what we had here tonight. What's the point? Another silly question... that's like asking 'what's the point of Shakira's hips?' You don't question miracles of Nature."

For the record, Bunnahabhain (pronounced Boona-Har-Vin) is a delicious single-malt from Islay (pronounced eye-la). If you'd like to know more about it, check out their Web site. Or better still, invest in a bottle.

* Please visit our Facebook page soon for images from this function.

Music to drink by? Hey, whatever it takes...

Image courtesy of Colleen Coppenhall

Sound designer and composer Shaun Michau created something phenomenal in its deceptive simplicity for Grolsch at Design Indaba 2011, which recently wrapped up at Cape Town’s CTICC (if you weren’t there, where the hell were you?). To create his unique melody, the man experimented with 200 bottles filled with water at different levels. This led to the discovery of seven distinctive notes in each Grolsch bottle which were ingeniously used to create a melody specially composed for the brand. The feature was built into Grolsch’s innovative 360-degree bar, where visitors were treated to a musical performance while sipping on an ice-cold Swingtop.

* Source: Grolsch

Quasar’s belch solves longstanding mystery.

Artist’s concept of the environment around the supermassive

black hole at the center of Mrk 231. The broad outflow seen

in the Gemini data is shown as the fan-shaped wedge at the

top of the accretion disk around the black hole.

Picture:Gemini Observatory/AURA, artwork by Lynette Cook

When two galaxies merge to form a giant, the central supermassive black hole in the new galaxy develops an insatiable appetite. However, this ferocious appetite is unsustainable. Now, for the first time, observations with the Gemini Observatory clearly reveal an extreme, large-scale galactic outflow that brings the cosmic dinner to a halt.

The outflow is effectively blowing the galaxy apart in a negative feedback loop, depriving the galaxy’s monstrous black hole of the gas and dust it needs to sustain its frenetic growth. It also limits the material available for the galaxy to make new generations of stars. The groundbreaking work is a collaboration between David Rupke of Rhodes College in Tennessee and the University of Maryland’s Sylvain Veilleux. The results are to be published in the March 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters and were completed with support from the US National Science Foundation.

According to Veilleux, Markarian 231 (Mrk 231), the galaxy observed with Gemini, is an ideal laboratory for studying outflows caused by feedback from supermassive black holes. “This object is arguably the closest and best example that we know of a big galaxy in the final stages of a violent merger and in the process of shedding its cocoon and revealing a very energetic central quasar. This is really a last gasp of this galaxy; the black hole is belching its next meals into oblivion!”

As extreme as Mrk 231’s eating habits appear, Veilleux adds that they are probably not unique: “When we look deep into space and back in time, quasars like this one are seen in large numbers and all of them may have gone through shedding events like the one we are witnessing in Mrk 231.”

The environment around such a black hole is commonly known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), and the extreme influx of material into these black holes is the power source for quasi-stellar objects or quasars. Merging galaxies help to feed the central black hole and also shroud it in gas. Mrk 231 is in transition, now clearing its surroundings.

Eventually, running out of fuel, the AGN will become extinct. Without gas to form new stars, the host galaxy also starves to death, turning into a collection of old aging stars with few young stars to regenerate the stellar population. Ultimately, these old stars will make the galaxy appear redder giving these galaxies the moniker “red and dead”.

Source: Gemini Observatory

Nanoparticles take on HIV and malaria.

 

Immune cells, tagged with green fluorescent protein,
are surrounded by nanoparticles (red) after the
nanoparticles are injected into the skin of a mouse.
Picture: Peter DeMuth and James Moon

MIT engineers have designed a new type of nanoparticle that could safely and effectively deliver vaccines for diseases such as HIV and malaria. The new particles, described in a recent issue of Nature Materials, consist of concentric fatty spheres that can carry synthetic versions of proteins normally produced by viruses. These synthetic particles elicit a strong immune response – comparable to that produced by live virus vaccines – but should be much safer, says Darrell Irvine, author of the paper and an associate professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering.

Such particles could help scientists develop vaccines against cancer as well as infectious diseases. In collaboration with scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the US, Irvine and his students are now testing the nanoparticles’ ability to deliver an experimental malaria vaccine in mice.

Vaccines protect the body by exposing it to an infectious agent that primes the immune system to respond quickly when it encounters the pathogen again. In many cases, such as with the polio and smallpox vaccines, a dead or disabled form of the virus is used. Other vaccines, such as the diphtheria vaccine, consist of a synthetic version of a protein or other molecule normally made by the pathogen.

When designing a vaccine, scientists try to provoke at least one of the human body’s two major players in the immune response: T cells, which attack body cells that have been infected with a pathogen; or B cells, which secrete antibodies that target viruses or bacteria present in the blood and other body fluids.

For diseases in which the pathogen tends to stay inside cells, such as HIV, a strong response from a type of T cell known as “killer” T cell is required. The best way to provoke these cells into action is to use a killed or disabled virus, but that cannot be done with HIV because it’s difficult to render the virus harmless.

Source: MIT news office.

Hot stuff... our Sun today.

Nasa/SOHO Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope

It took about eight minutes for the light making up this image to travel from our very own star (also known as the Sun) to Nasa’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). See the bright twisted clouds of hot gas, revealing storminess, and the dark, calm regions called “coronal holes”. These images, obtained with invisible ultraviolet light, give scientists their routine weather maps of the Sun.

Occasionally a solar flare appears as a small, intensely bright flash. Different colours denote various ultraviolet wavelengths, each emanating from gas at a particular temperature: orange – 80 000 degrees; blue – 1 000 000 degrees; green – 1 500 000 degrees; and yellow – 2 500 000 degrees. Just in case the question comes up in a quiz...

Bahrain’s artificial island paradise – from space.

Nasa/Earth Observatory

At the southern end of Bahrain Island, at the furthest point from the cities of the kingdom, a new complex of 14 artificial islands has risen out of the sea. Designed for residential living and tourism, and aimed at a cosmopolitan clientele, the Durrat Al Bahrain includes 21 square kilometres of new surface area for more than 1 000 residences, luxury hotels and shopping malls.

The complex has been designed to include: The Islands (six “atolls” leading off five fish-shaped “petals”), The Crescent, Hotel Island, and Durrat Marina in the north. The spectacular outline of this development, and other developments such as the Palm Jumeira and World Islands in the Persian Gulf, are best appreciated from above. In fact, views from jetliners at high altitude and from orbital platforms such as the International Space Station are the only way in which you can fully appreciate these man-made wonders.

This astronaut photograph, courtesy of Nasa, shows that construction on the surface of the two southern atolls and petals has yet to begin. Artificial beaches have been created on the inner shorelines of the Crescent and petals, with smaller beaches on the inner ends of the atolls and Hotel Island. The angular outline of the golf course, where many more residences are planned, can be seen between The Crescent and the marina. What may be a second marina is being carved out at the south end of the complex (mirroring the one on the north), although no such marina appears in earlier published plans for Durrat Al Bahrain.

Source: Nasa’s Earth Observatory

Bonding over bubblegum.



US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt Brian Ferguson (DoD) 

In keeping with PM’s brief to bring you odd and interesting images on every subject imaginable, we offer this picture of US Air Force Captain Ryan Weld spending quality time with villagers – one old, one somewhat newer, as evidenced by absent beard and pink bubblegum – during a wroowali (brotherhood) mission to Bakorzai village in Afghanistan. Weld, an intelligence officer with the US military, is assigned to Provincial Reconstruction Team Zabul.