Bright ideas working in the real world: clean power, clever materials and tools that make it easier to live lightly.
Innovations
Once a year the Great Barrier Reef spawns in a pink snowstorm, and most of that new life drifts away. A small clear box built by CSIRO and Southern Cross University holds it where it is needed, and the corals are settling in numbers nobody has managed before.
Ten years ago a team in Brazil chose a tree seed over a chemical. Now that seed pulls microplastics out of drinking water as well as the industry standard, and it is cleaning river water in their laboratory. Professor Adriano Reis and his team sent us their photographs and their story.
Off the Oregon coast the first grid connected wave energy test site in the United States is open after fifteen years of work, with room for twenty machines and a promise to study how they sit with marine life. A Fremantle company is about to put its own wave machine in the sea in Spain.
A researcher in Queensland has built a tool that reads drone photographs and counts every bird in them, and he has given it away to the world.
A water scientist in central New South Wales has built a plant that takes contaminants apart rather than straining them out, and his town now gets to use the same water twice.
An Anindilyakwa owned sea farm in the Gulf of Carpentaria is growing sandfish in a closed loop where nothing is wasted, and training the island's own kids to run it.
Published in Nature Health: satellite readings across 150 Chinese cities show fine particle pollution 23.8 per cent lower than it would have been without electric cars, and a great deal of breathing made easier.
A shoebox sized satellite built in Europe is the first of six that will hear from tiny tags on wild animals up to six times a day, a cheetah in Namibia among them.
Published in Nature this week: a plastic film that is brilliantly white and sheds water like a lotus leaf, with no titanium dioxide and none of the forever chemicals that usually do that job.
On a treatment lagoon at Cowes, a floating garden the size of a tennis court and a half has spent two years quietly doing the work of machinery, and the numbers from the world first trial are in.
France has stopped selling most copper fungicides, the standby of organic vineyards for a century. Into the gap steps a spray from Oxfordshire made of three plant oils, wrapped in yeast cells so the rain sets them free.
A yeast first found on grape skins eats surplus loaves and fills itself with fat. A company born in a Bath laboratory is now brewing it by the hundred thousand litres near Liverpool, and the oil behaves just like palm oil.
