Oh, this? Just some teenage girls from Africa who invented a urine-powered generator.
How’s this for an innovative startup: four African girls — the eldest of which is just fifteen years old — have worked together to invent a generator that’s powered by urine. The group presented their creation at this year’s Maker Faire Africa, and it’s so freaking brilliant it makes me want travel back in time and punch 15-year-old me right in the solar plexus.
The Next Web lays out how it works:
- Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which cracks the urea into nitrogen, water, and hydrogen.
- The hydrogen goes into a water filter for purification, which then gets pushed into the gas cylinder.
- The gas cylinder pushes hydrogen into a cylinder of liquid borax, which is used to remove the moisture from the hydrogen gas.
- This purified hydrogen gas is pushed into the generator.
1 Liter of urine gives you 6 hours of electricity.Here’s hoping these girls can get the funding they need to take this idea to new heights. Even if they don’t, we’ve got a feeling they’re going places.
Read more over at The Next Web.
And then I understood why I had survived.
Page 167 of Fake Science 101 proves that with great power comes great responsibility. Choose wisely.
– Sylvia Plath (via cobain-esque)
Hydro Power Project
“Hydro Project”, consists of shots in the construction of dams in Ethiopia and China. Splendid photographs the line between nature and human intervention by photographer Rüdiger Nehmzow.
AU › Vesper and James living together at Skyfall.
Work by Jason Padgett, a man with Acquired Savant Syndrome who now sees all of reality as mathematical fractals describable by equations.
About:
The beauty of numbers and their connection to the pure geometry of space time and the universe is shown in his fractal diagrams…He is currently studying how all fractals arise from limits and how E=MC2 is itself a fractal. When he first started drawing he had no traditional math training and could only draw what he saw as math. Eventually a physicist saw his drawings and helped him get traditional mathematics training to be able to describe in equations the complex geometry of his drawings. He is currently a student studying mathematics in Washington state where he is learning traditional mathematics so he can better describe what he sees in a more traditional form. Many of the captions were written before he had any traditional math training. His drawing of E=MC^2 is based on the structure of space time at the quantum level and is based on the concept that there is a physical limit to observation which is the Planck length. It shows how at the smallest level, the structure of space time is a fractal…So sit back and enjoy the beauty of naturally occuring mathematics in pure geometric form connecting E=MC2 (energy) to art. All are HAND DRAWN using only a pencil, ruler and compass.
