Taking a shower draws more water and more energy than any other daily household activity. Low-flow showerheads save only a little of both, typically at the expense of comfort. That's because they let the hot water-and all the heat energy it contains-go down the drain.

In 2004, Peter Brewin, an industrial-design student at the Royal College of Art in London, set about creating a more efficient shower that doesn't require lower pressure. It couldn't just capture and recirculate the water; most countries require shower water to meet potable-water standards. So instead he designed a miniature treatment plant that continuously captures, cleans, and recirculates 70 percent of the water used during a shower. Even with the energy the system consumes, it still uses 40 to 70 percent less power because the system doesn't have to heat as much water. Over the course of a year, a typical household would use 20,000 to 32,000 fewer gallons of water with Brewin's system. That, in turn, would save a local treatment plant upward of 200 kilowatt-hours of energy.

Because other water-treatment processes are too slow for real-time recirculation, Brewin decided to use pasteurization, the quick heating and cooling method for purifying milk. Shower water is already about 106°F when it hits the drain. A heat exchanger and a small electric heater raise the temperature the extra 56 degrees needed to reach the pasteurization point of 162°. To filter out dirt particles, Brewin constructed a funnel that spins the water that flows into it. Centrifugal force flings the heavy undissolved particles to the edges, where they are washed down the drain.

Within a year of starting work, Brewin had a proof-of-concept prototype. (To test its filtering ability, he would limit his showers to once a week.) Since then, he has licensed the technology to Australian engineering firm Cintep to solve remaining problems, such as how to more effectively remove shampoo residue. The first showers, which will most likely be installed in drought-prone cities and disaster areas, will debut next year.

Inventor: Peter Brewin
Invention: Recycling Shower
Cost to Develop: $1.75 million
Distance to Market: short ● ● ● ● ● long

HOW IT WORKS

A funnel separates undissolved particles from water. The water passes through a filter, a heat exchanger and a pasteurizer that kills any remaining bacteria. It circulates through the heat exchanger again and mixes with new cool water before entering the showerhead.

The Other 2012 Invention Awards Winners Are...

• A Spring-Loaded Ice Skate
• A Mister for Firefighters
• A Modular Cast
• An Assisted-Walking Device With Senses
• A Recirculating Shower
• A Higher-Efficiency, Lower-Emission Engine System
• An Inflatable Tourniquet
• A Better Lobster Trap
• A Simple Helicopter Engine
• Augmented-Reality Contact Lenses
• Where Are They Now? Winners From Past Years

For the better part of Frank Will's life, he has been consumed with improving engine performance. He started racing motorcycles as a teenager in Germany in the 1970s, winning a world championship race in 1991, and later became an automotive engineer at Ford in Australia. When he left his job in 2008, he applied his passion to a new endeavor: Over7, a system that by redirecting and then heating an engine's oil, cuts gas consumption by 7 percent and emissions by up to 30 percent.

Over7 heats oil to higher-than-usual temperatures, making it less viscous, without burning up the engine. The temperature of a warmed engine in a car running at a moderate speed, and the oil inside it, hovers at around 200°F. When the same engine is modified with an Over7 system, oil runs through it at 250° to 300°, while the engine block remains at 200°. Because this makes it easier to turn the crankshaft and run the oil pump, the engine requires less gas. The increased engine efficiency also reduces the emission of carbon dioxides, carbon monoxides and nitrogen oxides.

In the Over7 prototype, a bypass hose collects hot motor oil before it returns to the oil pan, where it would have cooled down, sending it instead to a heat exchanger that transfers heat from the engine's exhaust gas and makes the oil even hotter. A thermostat ensures that the exit temperature of the oil does not get above 300°, so it's still within most car manufacturers' maximum temperature specifications.

Will is now testing his invention at the Ford emissions labs where he used to work. He says new cars featuring Over7-adapted engines could roll off the assembly line in less than five years. In that time, he also plans to finish a $200-to-$400 conversion kit that mechanics could use to install the system in older cars. Putting an Over7 system in every passenger vehicle in the U.S. would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 64 million tons every year, he says-and save drivers seven billion gallons of gasoline.

Inventor: Frank Will
Invention: Over7
Cost to Develop: $200,000
Distance to Market: short ● ● ● ● ● long

HOW IT WORKS

Oil flows through a bypass pipe into a heat exchanger, rather than flowing back into an oil pan to cool. Once the oil is heated to as high as 300˚, a flap valve in the heat exchanger redirects exhaust gas into an exhaust bypass so that no further heat transfers to the oil.

The Other 2012 Invention Awards Winners Are...

• A Spring-Loaded Ice Skate
• A Mister for Firefighters
• A Modular Cast
• An Assisted-Walking Device With Senses
• A Recirculating Shower
• A Higher-Efficiency, Lower-Emission Engine System
• An Inflatable Tourniquet
• A Better Lobster Trap
• A Simple Helicopter Engine
• Augmented-Reality Contact Lenses
• Where Are They Now? Winners From Past Years

If your friends and family are anything like mine, you've observed that home beverage carbonation is experiencing a bit of a renaissance lately. Perhaps you've seen the increasingly ubiquitous Sodastream machine on a countertop near you-or, more likely, heard its syncopated honk and pop-fizz release from across the room, announcing another fresh liter of water made bubbly.

The Sodastream is a nice machine in a convenient package, but for the true fizz addict with a tinkerer's predilection, it's possible to build your own home carbonator that's cheaper, more flexible, and ultimately more satisfying. Here's why you might want to consider your own DIY rig, and most importantly, how to put it together. It's easy!

It's Cheaper

The Sodastream machine's Achilles heel is its tiny, proprietary CO₂ tank. The company (formerly known as Soda Club) sells seven different home carbonation machines ranging from $80 to $200 (enhancements along the line are mostly cosmetic), but only offers CO₂ canisters in 14.5 and 33-ounce sizes. (The measurements refer to the weight of the gas.) Sodastream claims somewhat optimistically that these are good to make a total of 60 and 130 liters of seltzer respectively. What's worse, these tanks have a proprietary cap which can only be filled by the company. My local kitchen supply store charges a hefty $15 to swap an empty 14.5-ounce tank for a new one. Compare that to the $15 charged by my friendly neighborhood welding supply shop to fill my new five pound tank, and the economics start to come into focus. With luck, my five-pounder won't need a refill until early 2013, and if you've got the room, you can go even bigger on the tank. Web carbonation guru Richard Kinch yields over 1,000 liters from his 20-pound tank-and he likes his seltzer extremely fizzy (more on that in a minute).

It's More Versatile

The Sodastream is an appealingly simple gadget. But once you develop a refined taste for on-demand seltzer, you may find it somewhat limiting. Sodastream's CO₂ regulators come factory-set and aren't adjustable, meaning it's impossible to go beyond its pre-defined pressure limit. But with your home-built model's adjustable regulator, you can fine-tune the level of carbonation applied to your liquids. Mr. Kinch favors a tongue-blistering 45-50 psi fizz on his soda water, but if you want a milder 30 psi pop, you can adjust your gas regulator with the quick turn of a screwdriver or wrench. Adjustable pressure also allows you to apply the ideal amount of carbonation to different types of liquids. If you're charging up a batch of tasty gin fizzes (or starting your own modernist cocktail bar), you'll want to dial up the pressure to 45 psi, since alcohol can dissolve more carbon dioxide than plain water. I don't know the ideal pressurization level for cream gravy, but with your bountiful supply of cheap CO₂, you're welcome to experiment (please report back with your findings).

With a home rig you can also ditch the Sodastream's proprietary one-liter plastic (or puny 620ml glass) bottles and use anything with a standard plastic soda bottle cap. One liter, two liters-even those cartoonishly obese three-liter bottles-all will work with your DIY carbonator. Just make sure it's plastic-a blown plastic bottle is much preferable to flying glass shrapnel in the unlikely case of rupture.

It's More Fun

If you've gotten this far, I probably don't need to explain to you how satisfying it is to improve on a commercial product with a more economical machine of your own construction. But even if this isn't typically your thing (I'm by no means a handyman), a home carbonator is an exceedingly easy project that just about anyone can handle. So let's get started.

Parts List

• A CO₂ tank of any size. Empties can be found on eBay and filled at welding shops, paintball facilities, homebrew hobby shops and elsewhere. My five-pound tank was $100 filled at McKinney Welding Supply in Manhattan and fits into a small cabinet in my kitchen.

• A gas regulator ($39.95, Amazon). The regulator tames the high-pressure inside the CO₂ tank and outputs an even flow of gas at constant, adjustable pressure into whatever you connect to the other end. Nicer ones will have two gauges-one for the gas tank's pressure which will hit zero when empty, and one that measures the output pressure into whatever you're gassing up.

• A length of vinyl tubing (Five ft. with hose clamps, $5.49, Amazon). Tubing rated for pressurized applications is required-you'll want about a 1/4" thickness. You can also get braided vinyl line for a bit more durability. The barb fitting of a CO₂ regulator typically has an outer diameter of 3/8 inch, so tubing with an inner diameter of 5/16 inch is what you want.

• A ball-lock keg coupler ($7.50, Amazon). This piece connects to the other end of your tubing and holds back gas flow until the little inner valve button is depressed by the tip your Carbonator bottle cap.

• The Carbonator bottle cap ($11.43, Amazon). This ingenious cap screws onto your soda bottle and provides a valve on the other end that engages with the keg coupler to connect your bottle to the gas supply without leaks.

• A standard soda bottle filled with cold liquid (warm water doesn't dissolve CO₂ well). Any size bottle will work, so long as it has the common cap size found on a typical two-liter bottle of Coke. I can't resist quoting Kinch again here, who very admirably takes nothing in his system for granted: "If we could send a few back through time to the ancients, these bottles would be considered precious jewels reserved for the king's use."

Total cost: $163.94. It's a little more money up front than all but the most pricey Sodastream machines, but those $15 canister refills add up quickly. After a few months you'll be saving money (ultimately, the system produces seltzer at three or four cents per liter-not bad!). You can also lower your initial spend on the CO₂ tank by shopping eBay.

Assembly

Once you have all your parts, final assembly can be done in 10 minutes or less. Here are the connections you make:

1. Attach the regulator to your CO₂ tank by lining up the threaded ends of each. Unless you're the Incredible Hulk, you'll want to crescent-wrench the regulator's threaded nut tight, using PTFE tape, to ensure a leak-free seal.
2. Attach one line of hose securely to the ridged metal piece (the "barb") on the bottom of your regulator. To the other end of the tube, attach the barb of your keg coupler. Hose clamps should be screwed tightly into place over each tube-covered barb for a snug fit. Congratulations, you're done!

Filling Your First Bottle

Now, for the grand finale. There are three points of gas control in our system: the tank's main on/off knob, the regulator's cutoff switch (right above the barb end (some regulators don't have this)), and the valve on your keg coupler. Gas only flows through the system when the Carbonator cap is snapped into the keg coupler (you can also reach inside the coupler and depress the valve with your finger if you want to torment the cats with a gust of CO₂). If you fill bottles frequently, you can leave the tank's main on/off valve open and use the regulator's cutoff switch to turn the gas on and off.

1. Bring the system up to pressure by opening the tank's main valve and the cutoff switch (parallel to the gas tube is "open"). Your gauges will spring to life. Turn the pressure adjustment knob or screw on the front of your regulator until the low-pressure gauge (the top one) reaches the desired level. I do my water at 35-40 psi. You'll want to dial up the pressure to 45-50 psi if it's fizzy cocktail hour.
2. Fill your soda bottle with cold liquid, but only up to the point where the diameter starts to recede at the top of the bottle. This leaves enough room for for the carbon dioxide.
3. With your Carbonator cap in one hand, squeeze the bottle until the liquid rises to the very brim. Holding it there, screw on the cap. We don't want any gas but CO₂ in our bottle.
4. With the gas turned off (using the regulator's cutoff switch), attach the Carbonator-capped bottle to the keg coupler by sliding the coupler's fitting up and snapping the bottle into place. Make sure it's on straight for a good seal.
5. Turn on the gas. Your bottle will puff out with a satisfying thump, inflated to the pressure of your choosing. Keeping the gas on, shake the bottle for 20-30 seconds to dissolve the CO₂ into the liquid. You'll see the regulator gauge fluctuate a bit as gas is dissolved-the system will keep the pressure constant, so as more gas is dissolved, more is passed into the bottle.
6. Turn off the gas, pop off the keg coupler, and unscrew the cap on your first bottle of delicious DIY seltzer. Ahhhhh!

And that's it! May you enjoy a long life of flexible, thrifty carbonation with your own home rig.

Even ordinary phenomena are fascinating to watch when they're filmed at 1,000 frames per second! This one reminds us for some reason of a wildlife documentary.

You can check out more slow-motion Phantom videos here. This one and this one might be particularly pertinent to Food Tech Week.

Thanks, Anna!

Don't forget to check out the rest of our great stories this week:

• FYI: Can Drinking Moonshine Really Make Me Go Blind?
• Industrial Food Machine of the Day: Slicing Your Breakfast Pastry With a Water Jet
• The Canning Jar: Ultra-Versatile Tool of the Modern Kitchen
• FYI: What Is Espresso?
• Six Food Experts Tell Us Their Favorite Food-Related Apps
• How a Lab of College Students Invented the World's Best Home Blast-Chiller
• FYI: Why Does Scotch Smell Like Band-Aids?
• How Science Measures Food: Cheese Stretchiness, Radiation in Bananas, and More
• PopSci Q&A: How the Rheon Machine Stuffs Any Food Into Any Other Food
• This Is the Food We'll Eat on Mars
• How To Make Your Own Home Drink Carbonation System

Have a great weekend everyone!

Long before he became an inventor, Jon Christiansen was a sea captain. In 1985 he was hired to sail a replica of the Godspeed, the ship that landed at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, in a reenactment of the original voyage. One day while he was cleaning the ship's hull, someone spun the wheel, trapping Christiansen's leg between the rudder and a support post. The accident severed or damaged most of the nerves below his left knee. Doctors told him he would never have feeling in his left foot again.

Christiansen had the strength to walk with a cane, but without feeling in his foot, he could not gauge when each step hit the ground without looking down. After a painful fall in 2003, he recruited two friends, engineers Richard Haselhurst and Steve Willens, to help him find a better way to get around. Willens came up with the idea of using tones to signal Christiansen's brain when his feet touched the ground, and in 2006 the three built a prototype of Sensastep.

To use Sensastep, the patient wears a conductive foam insole embedded with 13 pressure sensors. As the heel or toe strikes the ground, a transmitter strapped to the ankle sends signals to a receiver that slips over the ear. The earpiece vibrates against the bone behind the ear, stimulating the cochlear nerve. Variations in the vibrations, which the patient perceives as audible tones, alert the brain to which part of the foot has contacted the ground. Christiansen and other patients don't need to look down and watch every step they take to avoid falls.

Sensastep could help patients with sensory and motor-skill disabilities caused by diabetic neuropathy or Parkinson's disease, as well as those with balance problems from strokes or injuries. Compared with other assisted-walking devices, it will be convenient: The insole fits in any shoe, and the ankle and earpiece charge like a cellphone. The inventors have also developed an app to track patients' improvement.

Now they are looking for a medical-device company to license Sensastep. "We could go into production tomorrow," Christiansen says. "My goal is to get it out there and help as many people as possible."

Inventors: Jon Christiansen, Richard Haselhurst, Steve Willens Invention: Sensastep Cost to Develop: $200,000 Distance to Market: short ● ● ● ● ● long

HOW IT WORKS

The Other 2012 Invention Awards Winners Are...

• A Spring-Loaded Ice Skate
• A Mister for Firefighters
• A Modular Cast
• An Assisted-Walking Device With Senses
• A Recirculating Shower
• A Higher-Efficiency, Lower-Emission Engine System
• An Inflatable Tourniquet
• A Better Lobster Trap
• A Simple Helicopter Engine
• Augmented-Reality Contact Lenses
• Where Are They Now? Winners From Past Years

The Air Force's X-37B--its secret robotic space plane that's been orbiting the Earth on a mission shrouded in mystery for more than a year--landed safely in the wee hours Saturday morning at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Orbital Test Vehicle 2 (OTV-2) is the second X-37B test vehicle to successfully complete an orbital mission and autonomously return to Earth, following sister spacecraft OTV-1's 225-day mission in 2010.

That original mission lasted 224 days, a figure that at the time was mind-blowing for a top secret robotic spaceplane. It led to wide speculation about what the X-37B's are really capable of--the Air Force maintains that it is simply learning how to quickly recover and launch robotic spaceplanes, nothing more--as well as what their pickup-truck-sized cargo bays might be holding (the Air Force is silent on the latter point).

Related Articles

	The Air Force's Mysterious X-37B Spaceplane Celebrates Its First Full Year in Orbit
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	Russia is Building its Own Military Space Plane to Match the Mysterious X-37B

Tags

Technology, Clay Dillow, air force, military, orbital space planes, Space, spaceplanes, Video, x-37B

If anything, this most recent mission is proof that the Air Force is getting somewhere with its stated goal for the orbiters. With OTV-2 on the ground, OTV-1 is already being prepped for another mission slated to launch later this year. The Air Force likely won't be any more forthcoming about the payload or objectives of that mission either, but rumor has it that Boeing Phantom Works--maker of the X-37B--is exploring the possibility of building a larger version tentatively titled the X-37C that would be nearly twice as large and could carry up to six astronauts.

[NewsDaily]

For at least a year now, NASA has been waiting with bated breath for Voyager 1 to pass through the boundary of our solar system and become our first emissary to the stars. It's been cruising the edge for some time, but when it finally leaves forever, it won't be a satisfyingly clear punch-through - so it's hard to say exactly when this will happen. Or happened. Now the spacecraft is in another strange new zone, where the influx of cosmic particles has been ramping up by the week.

Related Articles

	Approaching Solar System's Edge, Voyager Probes Detect A Foamy Sea of Magnetic Bubbles
	Clear of Solar Pollution, Voyager Glimpses Star Formation in the Milky Way For the First Time
	Voyager 1 Has Entered 'Cosmic Purgatory,' Where No Probe Has Gone Before

Tags

Science, Rebecca Boyle, cosmic rays, heliosheath, heliosphere, interstellar space, solar system, voyager 1, voyager spacecraft

From January 2009 to January 2012, the spacecraft noticed a gradual 25 percent increase in these cosmic rays. Then starting on May 7, the cosmic ray hits started going up - 5 percent in a week, and 9 percent in a month, NASA says. That's a sign that Voyager is almost away from the sun's sphere of influence.

It's even possible that it's already gone. Scientists are still crunching two other sets of numbers that will help prove it: The magnetic field surrounding the spacecraft, which will switch directions when it exits, and the amount of solar particles blown out by the sun, which has dropped but hasn't stopped. It'll be a historic moment when that finally happens - or when the numbers show that it already has.

[Jet Propulsion Laboratory]