Advanced Invention

The idea of a dedicated room just for washers and dryers may be an alien idea for our future brethren. Designed by Harsha Vardhan from New Delhi, India, the Alternative Clothes Cleaner is a conceptual washing machine that doubles as a large seat.

It has two modes, active and passive, though both will allow you to sit atop the unit. No detergent or water necessary here, either — the inner chamber acts as a pressure washer and cleans the clothes with ionized air instead. That means no drying, too. It’s the kind of crazy technological mishmash you’d expect to see in The Jetsons, and we love it. Bring on espresso makers that will also tell you the news, or hair-dressing wall units that’ll play with the dog while you’re pampered. Check out the gallery below for more views of the versatile Alternative Clothes Cleaner.

KITCHEN SINK HELIOSPHERE: If the solar wind is like a stream of water spreading out on a flat sink bottom, then the boundary where the flow breaks against onrushing soapy water (interstellar gas) is the termination shock (recently encountered by the spacecraft Voyager 2) and the region of slower-moving water beyond it is the heliosheath.
Courtesy of J.R. Jokipii

Hurtling through space 31 years after its launch, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has sent back the most detailed view yet of the shock wave that marks the thinning of the solar wind, the charged particles streaming from the sun.

Researchers say the crossing confirms that the heliosphere—the region swept out by the solar wind—is actually lopsided, perhaps due to a tilted magnetic field in local interstellar space.

The shock wave, or heliospheric termination shock, occurs when the supersonic wind thins to the point that it can no longer rebuff the denser haze of charged particles flowing through interstellar space. Instead, the solar wind suddenly collapses in on itself.

A New Jersey resident generates and stores all the power he needs with solar panels and hydrogen

EAST AMWELL, N.J.—Mike Strizki has not paid an electric, oil or gas bill—nor has he spent a nickel to fill up his Mercury Sable—in nearly two years. Instead, the 51-year-old civil engineer makes all the fuel he needs using a system he built in the capacious garage of his home, which employs photovoltaic (PV) panels to turn sunlight into electricity that is harnessed in turn to extract hydrogen from tap water.

Although the device cost $500,000 to construct, and it is unlikely it will ever pay off financially (even with today’s skyrocketing oil and gas prices), the civil engineer says it is priceless in terms of what it does buy: freedom from ever paying another heating or electric bill, not to mention keeping a lid on pollution, because water is its only by-product.

“The ability to make your own fuel is priceless,” says the man known as “Mr. Gadget” to his friends. He boasts a collection of hydrogen-powered and electric vehicles, including a hydrogen-run lawn mower and car (the Sable, which he redesigned and named the “Genesis”) as well as an electric racing boat, and even an electric motorcycle. “All the technology is off-the-shelf. All I’m doing is putting them together.”

“I’m a self-sufficiency guy,” he adds. Strizki, a civil engineer, has been interested in alternative energy sources since 1997 when he began working on vehicles fueled by alternative means during his tenure with the New Jersey Department of Transportation.

Strizki’s two-story colonial on an 11-acre (4.5 hectare) plot 12 miles (19 kilometers) north of Trenton is the nation’s first private hydrogen-powered house, which he now shares with his wife, two dogs and a cat. (His two daughters and son, all in their 20s, have left the nest.) It has been running entirely on electricity generated from the sun and stored hydrogen since October 2006, when Strizki—in a project that his wife Ann fully supports—built an off-grid energy system with $100,000 of his own cash and $400,000 in grants from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, along with technology from companies such as Sharp, Swagelok and Proton Energy Systems.

Field of corn in Manitoba, Canada (Photograph: Corbis)

You can power laptops - and, potentially cars - using hydrogen extracted from water. The trouble is that it takes a lot of electricity. A simpler way would be to do it naturally, using enzymes - proteins which catalyse reactions - and bacteria. These do exist: certain green algae and “cyanobacteria” can split water using photosynthesis to produce molecular hydrogen.

But to create a generation of cars that would run on water with some sludge in the back, we need to learn how to design our own bacteria and enzymes that can co-opt natural processes for our ends.

Natural hydrogen-producing enzymes are complex, often using metal atoms to help them work. “For many of the enzymes related to energy production, people have no idea how they are actually organised,” says Giovanna Ghirlanda, a protein-design researcher at the University of Arizona. In some cases, no one knows where the metal atoms lie within the protein, she says.

Natural enzymes won’t work too well in future fuel cells; they need to be modified, as the best hydrogen producers are poisoned by oxygen. “But oxygen is one of the main products of photosynthesis,” says Professor Alfonso Jaramillo of the Ecole Polytechnic, near Paris.

Some researchers are trying to tweak the enzymes to make them less sensitive to oxygen, but with limited success. As a part of the EU-funded BioModularH2 project, Jaramillo’s team is using a different approach: stick with the natural enzyme and engineer another set of proteins that take oxygen out of the cell before it can do any harm. These hydrogen producers are longer-term options: it may take 10 years to get to a prototype, says Jaramillo.