Author: Anna Green

An Israeli company called Water-Gen has created a device that produces fresh drinking water from water vapor in the air. Business Insider reports that the company, founded by Arye Kohavi, wants to help bring clean drinking water to regions experiencing water shortages.

The water generator, which comes in three sizes, uses plastic “leaves” to cool the air and then collects the resulting condensation. On an 80°F day with 60 percent humidity, the largest size can produce up to 825 gallons of water. The smallest, meanwhile, is able to produce 4 gallons under the same circumstances. While a warmer, more humid climate allows the generators to produce more water, the technology still works in cool, dry environments—albeit at a slower rate.

While the smallest water generator is designed for homes and offices, Kohavi hopes to collaborate with national governments to bring the largest generators to areas without enough potable water. The company is currently running tests in several cities, including Mumbai, Shanghai, and Mexico City. Kohavi told Business Insider his goal is to make the devices available throughout Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

“Water from air is for places that you don’t have any water to filter,” Kohavi told Business Insider. “We think our solution can solve the problem on the level of countries. It’s an immediate solution—governments don’t need to spend decades to make a big project.”

[h/t Business Insider]

Activity trackers are a fun way to keep track of steps walked, miles biked, or calories burned—but don’t expect them to automatically help you lose weight. According to a recent study in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, activity trackers may be less effective as a weight loss aid than previously believed. In fact, the study found that participants who did not use an activity tracker actually lost, on average, more weight than those who did.

In order to study the effectiveness of activity trackers, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh enlisted a group of 471 volunteers who wanted to lose weight. For six months, all volunteers followed the same diet and exercise regimen—and all lost some amount of weight. After that, volunteers were broken up into two groups: Members of one group were given wearable activity trackers to monitor their physical activity, while the other group was asked to record their daily exercise progress on a website. After 18 months, researchers weighed volunteers and observed their progress. They were surprised to find that the activity tracker group lost an average of 7.7 pounds, while those who did not use the wearable devices lost an average of 13 pounds.

Researchers are still unsure why those who wore activity trackers lost less weight than those who did not. Lead researcher John Jakicic told The New York Times he believes participants may have placed too much responsibility on the technology to help them lose weight, or became demoralized when they failed to reach their daily fitness goals. However, he says more research is needed to determine why activity trackers were ineffective, and whether they can be usefully used by some as a weight loss device.

“The findings of our study are important because effective long-term treatments are needed to address America’s obesity epidemic,” Jakicic said in a statement. “We’ve found that questions remain regarding the effectiveness of wearable devices and how to best use them to modify physical activity and diet behaviors in adults seeking weight loss.”

[h/t The New York Times]

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For most of us, the airport is just the first stop on the way to a relaxing vacation—not the vacation destination itself. But one man recently embarked upon a luxurious 18-day vacation without ever leaving Singapore’s Changi Airport, Atlas Obscura reports.

A former business developer, Raejali Buntut was returning to Malaysia after a trip abroad when he overslept in the Changi Airport lounge and missed his flight home. Instead of booking a new flight, Buntut inexplicably spent 18 days—from August 21 to September 7—living in the airport. For more than two weeks Buntut bounced from transit lounge to transit lounge, using his computer to forge boarding passes for different airlines. Buntut, who is apparently savvy in both forgery and Photoshop, added his name, fake flight numbers, and fake destinations onto mobile boarding pass images he found online, according to The Straits Times.

But like all vacations, Buntut’s airport adventure eventually came to an end: An airport lounge employee finally noticed that Buntut had entered the lounge for the fourth time in just 10 days—a highly improbable event for even the most frequent flyers—and Buntut was arrested. It’s still unclear why he decided to spend weeks living in the airport instead of returning home, though it should be noted Changi Airport has no shortage of amenities. It has been dubbed both the “World’s Best Airport” and “The Best Airport For Leisure Amenities” by Skytrax and provides travelers with everything from shops and video games to a butterfly garden, and even a swimming pool with a Jacuzzi.

[h/t Atlas Obscura]

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Sony CSL Research Laboratory has taken a major step towards making human musicians obsolete. Inverse reports that researchers at Sony have released a catchy pop song inspired by The Beatles but composed by an artificial intelligence system called Flow Machines.

In order to create the song, which is called “Daddy’s Car,” researchers set up a database of sheet music by a range of musicians, in a range of styles. A human composer selected the style of the song—in this case, the 1960s pop stylings of The Beatles—while Flow Machines composed the melody and harmony. A human musician then produced and mixed the song. Sony plans to officially release “Daddy’s Car,” which can be heard above, on a pop album composed entirely by artificial intelligence sometime in 2017.

[h/t Inverse]

Banner Image Credit: Getty

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are building a database of human torsos in order to teach computers about the topography of the human body, Atlas Obscura reports. This week, project creators Adam Milner and Ben Snell teamed up with a group of volunteers to organize and classify about 10,000 shirtless selfies.

The so-called Torso Computer Club has a few goals: Milner and Snell hope they can use their selfie collection to teach computers to differentiate between belly buttons and nipples—a task that may sound simple, but is still difficult for computers to achieve. The two are also interested in teaching computers to identify a range of physical characteristics (freckles and hair, for instance) and even poses.

Milner originally began collecting torso selfies on Grindr and other dating apps. By teaching computers to classify elements of the torso photos, they believe they can not only teach computers more about human physiology, but learn a little more about human behavior, themselves. Already, they’ve used a computer to identify a range of selfie archetypes, like profile shots and mirror selfies, based on their torso selfie database.

Part of the goal of the Torso Computer Club is simply to provide a dataset for other researchers. As Snell notes, “There aren’t open source data sets of torsos just lying around the internet.” However, both Snell and Milner hope to use their torso photo collection to pursue research of their own. Snell tells Atlas Obscura, “We want to continue mining this collection for the potential it has, though less as a tool and more as a form of provocation and speculation.”

Like #machinelearning? #torsos? #dumplings? Help label 1000s of nipples & navels this Tuesday 9/20 @creativeinquiry! pic.twitter.com/HGF26dV0qF

— Golan Levin (@golan) September 17, 2016

[h/t Atlas Obscura]

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A Seattle startup called Human wants to make wearable technologies inspired by, well, humans. Their first product is a pair of wireless headphones called Sound, inspired by the structure of the human ear. Instead of earbuds that sit within the ear, or bulky headphones that sit atop the ear, the Sound headphones encompass the ear, fitting snugly in a way that’s designed to feel more natural.

The headphones, WIRED reports, are currently available for preorder on Indiegogo. In addition to their unique shape, the Sound comes with a range of interesting features: “Social” mode allows users to listen to the same music together or share sounds with each other, while “Fade” mode allows users to adjust how much ambient noise the headphones allow in. The headphones can even be snapped together to create a miniature portable speaker. Users can manage what they’re listening to by tapping and swiping the headphones themselves, or by using an app.

On Indiegogo, company founders Joe Dieter and Ben Willis claim that their Sound device is more than a set of headphones—it’s designed to feel like it’s part of your body. “Sound is the evolution of personal audio,” the IndieGogo campaign reads. “Rather than build another bulky headphone or easily-lost plastic earbud, Human is building a fresh design that comfortably and securely attaches to the ear, combines multiple industry-bending functions, and acts as an extension of the human body.”

[h/t WIRED]

All Images: Human

Americans are spending a lot and saving very little, according to a recent poll by GOBankingRates. Time reports that GOBankingRates recently asked 7000 Americans how much money was in their savings account, and the results were more than a little concerning: 69 percent of Americans polled reported having less than $1000 in their savings accounts, while a full 34 percent reported having $0 saved up.

Unsurprisingly, results of the poll varied by income and age: By and large, young Millennials (those between age 18 and 34) and people with lower incomes had saved the least, while seniors and people with higher incomes saved the most. For instance, while 37 percent of people making between $25,000 and $50,000 reported having no savings, only 6 percent of people making more than $150,000 reported the same.

Results of the poll were worrying across the board. Even for older adults and the relatively well-off, savings were surprisingly low. Certified financial planner Brandon Hayes speculates that this may be, in part, because cashless payment options make it too easy to spend money. “Our issue is we’re spending before we even save and then never look back,” he told GOBankingsRates. “With a cashless society, it’s tough to appreciate a dollar when you never see one.”

However, CFP Michael Hardy admits that part of the problem may be the myriad financial pressures Americans are currently facing. He explains, “Many people save too much for things like retirement, college savings, or investments and squeeze themselves too tightly financially, leaving little room for spending or building of their emergency fund.”

[h/t Time]

They may not look it, but pigeons are surprisingly smart birds. With a little help from humans, they can learn to deliver messages, spot cancer cells on a mammogram, and even distinguish between the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet. Now, the latest study on pigeon intellect, published in the journal PNAS, finds that the remarkably bright birds can even distinguish between written words and nonsensical strings of letters.

Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand and Ruhr University in Germany trained pigeons to peck four-letter English words as they appeared on a screen, or peck a separate symbol when a four-letter nonsense term appeared. Over time, they trained four pigeons to build “vocabularies” of between 26 and 58 written words. They found that not only could the pigeons successfully identify the words they’d learned, they could often identify new words they’d never seen.

Though they lacked decoding skills, the study concluded that the birds were capable of processing orthographic information. That is, though the birds were unable to read and understand the words they saw, they were still able to successfully identify visual patterns (or “orthographic properties”) that defined words. For instance, researchers observed that the pigeons could recognize “bigrams” (letter pairs) that were associated with words. They learned to distinguish bigrams commonly used in words (for instance, “AL” and “EL”) in order to distinguish words from nonsense.

The findings are significant, not only because they show pigeons shouldn’t be dismissed as “bird-brained,” but because they reveal that orthographic learning isn’t unique to humans and other primates. In a statement, researcher Onur Güntürkün said, “That pigeons—separated by 300 million years of evolution from humans and having vastly different brain architectures—show such a skill as orthographic processing is astonishing.”

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If you’re a disaster in the kitchen, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that people have been burning dinners and ruining pans for thousands of years. ScienceNordic reports that archaeologists in Denmark recently discovered a rare Bronze Age pot with what appears to be a layer of 3000-year-old burnt cheese crusted onto the bottom—possibly the result of an ancient cooking accident.

Archaeologists noticed that the pot, which was excavated in central Jutland, appeared to have a layer of white-yellow residue coating its bottom, so they sent it to the Danish National Museum for analysis. Researchers there ruled out meat and plant matter as possible sources of the residue, concluding that it was a “foamy, vitrified material” that looked a lot like cow fat. While researchers still aren’t completely sure what the substance is, they think it’s likely the result of cheesemaking gone awry.

“The fat could be a part of the last traces of curds used during the original production of traditional hard cheese,” archaeologist Kaj F. Rasmussen told ScienceNordic. ” The whey is boiled down, and it contains a lot of sugars, which in this way can be preserved and stored for the winter.”

Rasmussen observed that the pot, with its charred remains, tells a bit story, though we’ll never know the details for sure. He speculated to ScienceNordic that it may have been quickly discarded by an embarrassed chef thousands of years ago. “I cannot help but wonder if someone had a guilty conscience. It’s well and truly burnt and must have smelt terrible,” he said.

[h/t ScienceNordic]

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Matches are so cheap and ubiquitous that it can be easy to underestimate what a scientific marvel they truly are. While our ancient ancestors had to laboriously spark rocks or use wooden bow drills to light a fire, the combination of chemicals on a match head lets us create a flame instantaneously.

In the short video above, Science Channel goes behind the scenes at a match factory, revealing how matchbooks are made, step by step. First, industrial workers cook up a giant potion of potassium chlorate, gelatin, silica granules, and boiling water to create the substance for the match heads. Then, massive, complex machines divide, organize, and package matchsticks, in a process that is awe-inspiring in both scale and efficiency.

Banner Image Credit: Science Channel, YouTube