Supermoon 2013: Readers' Photos

On June 22 and 23, the Earth's only natural satellite put on a dazzling show. Although the 'supermoon' phenomenon isn't exactly an astronomical term, and it's not an event of any great scientific consequence, it captivated the world. The cosmic coincidence of the moon being at its full phase as it made its closest approach (perigee) in its elliptical orbit, caused the 2013 supermoon to be 14 percent larger in the sky (when compared to its furthest point in orbit, or apogee) and 30 percent brighter, according to NASA. It rapidly became a beautiful astronomical spectacle.

Tiny Channels Take Salt From Seawater

Drinking water is a vital need in many parts of the world, and one method of getting it is desalination, which is just taking the salt out of seawater. But the plants require either lots of energy or special filters — and both of those things are costly.

Now there’s a possible workaround: a system of tiny channels, built into a chip, that pulls the salt out of the water with little energy and no need for filter technologies that are difficult to make and maintain.

That would be a huge boon to areas where water is scarce, but seawater isn’t. The largest desalination plant is in Saudi Arabia, and some Caribbean islands depend on it. Both locales need a lot of energy to run the plants, though. The world Health Organization says about a billion people around the world have no access to safe water. Many of those people live in arid coastal regions in Africa and the Middle East.

Richard M. Crooks at the University of Texas at Austin and Ulrich Tallarek at the University of Marburg, Germany, developed the idea. They forced salty water down a channel that splits into two branches. Each of the smaller channels was about 22 microns wide. The two small channels were connected to an electrode that juts into the point where they branch.

Then they applied just 3 volts to the electrode. The voltage changes some of the chloride ions, which have negative charges, into neutral chlorine. This has the effect of increasing the electric field strength and making a gradient across the two channels. That gradient forces ions into one channel, while the fresh water flows down the other.

The whole system is cheaper than filters because it won’t get clogged, and it uses a lot less energy than current desalination systems.

The two scientists are developing the technology with a startup, Okeanos Technologies, and presented their work in the journal Angewandte Chemie

Raise Edible Insects With Kitchen Terrarium

As the 17-year-cicada cycles nears and the insects get ready to descend upon the East Coast, some people are excited to saute them with lemon and butter. Even the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is on board, having recently released a report suggesting we should all be eating more insects.

Mansour Ourasanah agrees. That’s why he, in collaboration with KitchenAid, has designed Lepsis, a small, decorative pod for the kitchen that’s used to grow insects for food. The sleek terrarium consists of four individual sections developed to breed, grow and harvest protein-rich grasshoppers.

Ourasanah cites environmental and nutritional problems bolstered by dependence on meat and population growth as reasons to grow your own insects. Beleaguered by inhumane conditions and genetically modified animals pumped full of antibiotics, factory farms require vast swaths of land, where flatulent bovines and other ruminant livestock annually produce about 80 million metric tons of methane gas. According to the EPA, this accounts for about 28 percent of global methane emissions from human-related activities.

“With much of the damage being done in the industrialized world, the objective of this project was to find a sustainably viable alternative to current food production through a meticulous analysis of modern nutritional challenges and expectations,” Ourasanah writes.

Ourasanah adds: “Eighty percent of the world population already eats insects. Unfortunately, the remaining 20 percent have the most impact on the ecological fate of the planet.”

Therefore, Ourasanah says, the challenge moving forward was to find a practical way to introduce this unconventional nutritional experience to a rapidly expanding urban environment. He believes the Lepsis could win over some skeptics, especially for those who find eating insects repulsive.

“In order to move toward a sustainable future, we must do away with our culinary hangups and redefine the paradigm of food,” Ourasanah writes.

Although the Lepsis is still in the prototype phase, it is a finalist for an INDEX award, one of the biggest design awards in the world and one that champions designs that improve life.

Indoor Clouds: Your New Weather Forecast

I usually reserve about as much excitement for weather forecasts as I do for banging my head against a brick wall. However, here's a whimsical puff of prediction that's literally left my head in the clouds.

It's the Nebula 12, a weather forecasting machine that uses meteorological data to generate indoor clouds as a representation of what to expect when you step outside.