The Future of Waste/Electricity:

Converting electricity through toilet flushes

DMU Industrial design student, Tom Broadbent’s money and energy-saving brainwave is called the HighDro Power and works by harnessing the energy from falling waste water in the soil pipes of high-rise buildings, converting it to electricity through an ingenious device.

As well as having developed a potentially commercially viable product, Tom is waiting to hear whether he will win accolades from the Institute of Engineering Designers (IED) and the Dyson Awards. He is also entering the Kevin McCloud Green Heroes award to win the opportunity to show HighDro Power at the NEC’s Grand Designs Live show.

The invention was developed in answer to targets set at the G8 Summit by governments to reduce their country’s carbon dioxide emissions and dependency on fossil fuels for energy production by 2050. In HighDro Power, the electricity can either be utilised in the building to save £926-per-year for a seven-storey building or sold back to the national grid on a buy-back tariff.

Via robotindisguise

Extreme Hobbyists Put Satellites Into Orbit With $8,000 Kits | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

This is an interesting article with some exciting implications for a project I work on outside of my day job. But the attached yellow image is not TubeSat.  TubeSat is more like the green one.  

Nevertheless this could be the beginnings of private space exploration.

Ex-Googlers Launch “Newspaper Of The Future”

Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack.

A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them.

Via emergentfutures