Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Evelyn Wang/MIT)

Luke Skywalker may have been unimpressed with the life of a Tatooine moisture farmer, but a simple device that could economically harvest water from desert air would really be pretty exciting. According to Wookieepedia, the “moisture vaporators” the young Skywalker tended utilized refrigeration coils to chill air to the dew point and collect the water that condensed. We can certainly do that today (as they could “a long time ago... ”), but the amount of energy required makes collecting condensation impractical.

Enter a new study device developed by MIT’s Hyunho Kim. His idea is to work with a unique class of materials called “metal-organic frameworks.” Organic, carbon-based molecules form links between metallic ions to create interesting 3D structures that can have lots of open space internally. This allows the structures to do strange things, like make a high-pressure tank hold far more hydrogen gas after it’s first filled with granules of the right metal-organic framework material.

Kim worked with a zirconium oxide paired with an organic molecule. The combination has the useful quality of grabbing and holding onto water vapor at lower temperatures, but also letting go of that water as the heat rises. So the basic idea is that a device based on this material could passively harvest water vapor from the air at night and then release it (to be collected) in the heat of the day.

Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—As regular readers of Cars Technica know, the auto industry is going full-speed ahead when it comes to self-driving cars. A number of OEMs and their technology company partners have promised us SAE "level 4" self-driving vehicles by 2021. But not all of these organizations are taking the same road to get there. Some, like Ford and Volvo, have decided to go straight to full autonomy by working on vehicles that won't need a human driver at all within specific geofenced areas (these are vehicles that you or I will use through ride-hailing services). Others, notably General Motors and Audi, believe in some degree of returning control to the human driver, who may or may not be giving the road their full attention. At this year's New York International Auto Show, the former group broke cover with its new Super Cruise system, which will be available on the Cadillac CT6 sedan later this year.

To be accurate, unlike the system due to appear in Audi's next A8 flagship, Super Cruise is only a level 2, not level 3, autonomy. There are already plenty of level 2 autonomous systems on the market already, typically cars with a combination of adaptive cruise control—which maintains a car's speed to traffic ahead via the use of radar—and a lane keeping assist that reads the lane markers on the road with an optical sensor and steers to keep the car centered between them. But Super Cruise is closer to level 3 than pretty much every other level 2 system out there, since it combines adaptive cruise control and lane keeping with two notable advances that are going to play a large role in more autonomous cars in the future.

Enlarge (credit: Google Fiber)

Google Fiber and other ISPs that want to build new networks might get good news from the Federal Communications Commission, which is considering rules that would speed up the process of attaching wires to utility poles.

Current FCC rules allow for up to a five-month waiting period before new ISPs can install wires on utility poles that already hold the wires of incumbent providers. This is a problem for Internet users who often don't have any choice of high-speed providers. The new FCC proposal from Chairman Ajit Pai could shave a couple of months off the maximum waiting periods.

The rules wouldn't eliminate all the problems that recently caused Google Fiber to cut its staff and pause fiber operations in 11 cities while it pursues wireless networking technology. But Google Fiber said the initial FCC proposal is a good step.