Posts by — Alexbenady

Could Cicida wings help save our species?

When scientists at U. Florida developed a new anti-reflective, water-repellent coating based on moths’ eyeballs and cicada wings, they hoped to  improve solar cell efficiency  by 30% – and make the panels self-cleaning into the bargain.

Moths’ eyes have thousands of rows of tiny protrusions each measuring less than 300 billionths of a meter. When a light is shone on them these orderly arrays interfere with its reflection, rendering the light nearly invisible. The same principle applied to solar panels increased their efficiency.  Biologists believe the trait evolved in moths because it prevents their eyes from reflecting moon or starlight, which would make them easier targets for predators. Similar features on Cicada wings deflect not light but water, to help them fly in humid environments.

“Nature is an amazing innovator,” explained Peng Jiang the assistant professor of chemical engineering at University of Florida who is leading the research. “What I’m interested in doing is mimicking the structure of some remarkable biological systems for real-world use.”

He’s not alone. Biomimicry or biomimetics is a red hot discipline these days. Defined as ‘the study of biological systems in nature to help solve human problems’, it is being touted by many as the holy grail of future sustainable development. And it’s not hard to see why. (more…)

Biomimic Nick Brown

In early 1990 Nick Brown, the British entrepreneur behind the Paramo clothing brand, was struggling with the problem of how to make waterproof, outdoor activity clothing last longer. Sweat and condensation tends to rot conventional gear at the seams and once that happens the jacket usually has to be scrapped. As he already sold a water-repellent wax for clothing, he was particularly interested in the idea that more could be done to prolong the life of outdoor clothing using  water-repellency.

He grappled with the problem for three years before turning to nature for the answer. But he didn’t have a team of physicist and biologists on hand. He had no expensive analytical equipment to help him. He finally found it with the help of a wet dog. And it cost him nothing. (more…)

Rousson and friend

A low tech, man-powered  yellow submarine may not be high on the list of requirements for la vie off-grid, but French adventurer Stephane Rousson and designer Minh-Lôc Truong have gone ahead and made one anyway. In Rousson’s garage.

The Scubster  is the world’s first pedal powered submarine and it has recently successfully finished its first test in the Mediterranean off Nice. (more…)

‘Sexyback’ singer Justin Timberlake this week re-opened his luxury ‘eco-friendly’ golf course in Memphis Tennessee  after investing millions of dollars on an environmental upgrade.

Note that’s ‘eco-friendly’ not ‘zero-impact’ or even ‘low-impact. (more…)

Dutch John works on his gasifier

Whenever Dutch John goes into town, which is as seldom as possible, he tends to walk or take the bike.

He describes himself as a “low profile anarchist and an off-gridder in the broadest senses of the word”. But it’s not just his environmental beliefs that prevent him from taking the car.

Every time he uses his twenty year old Volvo 240, first he has to clean up the cyclone bin, dump the char dust on the compost, fill the fuel bin with sixty pounds of wood, stacking a few sacks on the back seat for extra mileage, spark up the gasifier with a diesel glow plug, wait four minutes for it to heat up,  flare off the surplus carbon monoxide and hydrogen. And then he’s off. (more…)

Yet these things exist. They are called ram pumps. And the mystery is not how do they  magically raise water to a higher level with no external power?  It is, given that they are so simple, so cheap and so effective at what they do, why are they so little known?

For those who haven’t been paying attention, a ram pump is a pump that uses the force of moving water –a stream for instance, to pump a smaller amount of water, sometimes hundreds of meters uphill with no external power source. (more…)

Leary, his bike-powered-water-pump and friends

A British engineering student has invented a bicycle-powered water pump that could enable huge areas of ‘off-grid’ land to be irrigated for the first time.

Jon Leary, 24, a masters student at Sheffield Department of Mechanical Engineering was tasked to ‘make something useful out of rubbish’ for his dissertation. He came up with the idea of a ‘bicicomba movil’ –an inexpensive mobile bicycle powered water pump made from salvaged materials that can be used for irrigation and general water distribution almost anywhere in the world. (more…)