It’s easy for consumers to buy food and drinks like a bowl of hot rice and coke online or from neighbourhood shops, but for astronauts such things were impossible in the past.

Members of China’s Shenzhou manned space flight last year, however, were able to enjoy such food, thanks to Joyoung, a Chinese firm. Joyoung created a mobile space kitchen for the astronauts. A drinking water machine, an air heater and a soybean milk maker were all accessible in the kitchen through a smart app. Tang Hongbo, who was a member of the Shenzhou manned spacecraft, said in the news that during his three month trip, he could eat hot food with just half-hour efforts, a contrast to the past when similar attempts required several hours. If we had time, we would also use equipment to eat homemade yogurt. We could also control the equipment in the space kitchen through mobile phone apps,” he said.

In the past, most foods couldn’t be directly heated in a microwave oven in the space. Conduction equipment often caused uneven (不均匀的) heating. An astronaut had to spend as long as four hours to heat some vegetables in the space kitchen. To solve the problem, Joyoung has developed equipment that gives out hot air to heat vegetables in a 360-degree way. That enables astronauts to eat steaming-hot fish-flavoured pork and Gongbao chicken, a spicy, stir-fried Chinese dish.

Besides Joyoung, a group of companies, including Xiaomi Corp and Huawei Technologies, have contributed their technologies to the development of the space station. A vacuum (真空) cleaner enabled haircuts on the spacecraft possible. NOLO VR, a Chinese virtual reality manufacturer, has helped astronauts develop an experimental equipment through which laboratory technicians on the ground can see and experience what astronauts are doing in the space.

African Bushmen may be able to help. For hundreds of years. Bushmen have understood the ways of wild animal: what the animals cat; where the animals go; and even where they sleep. However, the Bushmen don’t always speak the same language as the conservationists. This can cause problems when they work together. This is where the Cyber Tracker comes in.

The Cyber Tracker is an invention created by Louis Liebenberg. He hopes that together, the Cyber Tracker and the Bushmen can help protect the animals. The Cyber Tracker is a small computer that helps collect information about animals. It uses pictures, called “icons”, instead of words to record information. There are pictures for drinking, walking, fighting, sleeping, eating and other things. This way, the Bushmen can record what they see even without speaking the same language. The Cyber Tracker can collect very detailed and complicated information very quickly.

However. that’ s not the only thing the Cyber Tracker can do. The small computer also contains a global positioning device. Each time a Bushman sees something interesting about an animal or plant, he pushes a button The Cyber Tracker records exactly where the man is in the world. The Bushman can also record what the animals are eating by pushing different buttons to name about 50 plants.

However, Liebenberg adds that the human factor is also very important. A big part of the project is the Bushman’s ability to understand and correctly report everything he sees. The combination of machine and man seems to work very well. With the data collected by the Cyber Tracker. Liebenberg makes maps showing where the animal herds are and what the animals are eating, indicating facts about their health.

In 2018, a severe drought brought Cape Town close to “Day Zero”, when it could have become the world’s first major city to run out of water. Dam levels in South Africa’s Western Cape fell to below a fifth of capacity and the province suffered its worst water crisis in 100 years.

“The water supply was dwindling and it just wasn’t raining,” recalls Thinus Booysen, a professor at Stellenbosch University, who had created a device in 2015 designed to help homeowners cut their power usage. Seeking to reduce water waste, Booysen figured he could adapt the device to measure water usage instead of electricity use.

Soon, Booysen launched a start-up, Bridging the Internet of Things (BridgloT), to develop his idea. Called Count Dropula, the device reports water usage once a minute while many conventional devices only record data once an hour. The system uses an app in the user’s cellphone and sends short messages in real time. “Within minutes, we would be able to tell the user, ‘Something has burst, or something is leaking,’” he says.

Then Booysen discovered that a key issue was maintenance (维修), with the poorest schools using by far the most water. Leaking toilets could waste 1,000 liters of water per day. “We found that the biggest problems are things like children not closing taps properly, but often that would be because the taps just don’t close,” Booysen explains. During the test, the invention saved one school more than three million liters of water in three months. Another reduced its water usage 55 percent in four months.

Businesses including Cape Talk radio station and Africa’s largest food company, Shoprite, became sponsors, partnering with the Western Cape Education Department to install (安装) test devices in 350 schools. They saved more than $2.7 million and almost 550 million liters of water in 17 months. Booysen has looked at expanding to government buildings, hospitals and hotels. There are plans to roll out the device across Africa.