The name sounds funny but the idea is no joke: it’s a personal toilet called the pee-pool, Anders Wilhelmson, a Swedish architect, is the inventor of the pee-pool.

He became interested in the idea of sanitation(卫生设施) after taking part in a research project on the social and political development of cities. One of the most common problems he found in developing countries was the lack of toilets. He wanted to do something to help. So working with others, he started the project in 2005, and the next year started a company called Peepoolple.

The toilet is a single—use bag made of environmentally friendly plastics. The inside is treated with urea(尿素), a chemical commonly used as fertilizer. The hotter the weather, the more quickly the waste turns into what is needed by plants. The sanitation process can be as soon as a couple of hours or as long as two to four weeks. You can just bury it in a pot and grow whatever you like.

The company expects to start selling the bags in August in Kenya and Bangladesh, but it is just beginning production and sales in Nairobi now. Full production could reach about half a million bags a day and people may be able to buy the pee-pool in countries Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc.

The United Nations says more than two and a half billion people around the world do not have good sanitation. Many have no choice but to use the outdoors, which is not only bad for the environment, but also harmful to people’s health. Each year, poor sanitation leads to three fifths of those people getting an infectious disease which on average causes one out of 1,000 patients to die.

Jack Smith, the founder of the World Toilet Organization, says “This is quite an unacceptable situation given the fact that we are living in the modern world. And strangely, many of them own televisions, phones but have no toilet.”

In late summer, Death Valley National Park earns its name. The heat in this region of California and Nevada is unbearable. Despite the heat, there was a slow but steady drop of water into the collection bottle of Omar Yaghi’s device, a group of components resembling a telescope. By the end of the day, this system had collected only a few millilitres of water — barely enough for a refreshing sip. But these results, published in July, represent a landmark in the field of Atmospheric Water Harvesting (AWH).

The key ingredient in this device — a water-absorbing chemical called MOF-303 — has the potential to deliver life-sustaining volumes of clean water to regions that currently struggle to access it. “The vision there is to have something like a village-scale device,” says Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California. “If you’ve got a tonne of MOF-303, you could deliver about 500 litres of water a day.”

By current estimates, roughly two billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Desalinated seawater can meet some of this need, but the technology required remains costly and is limited to coastal regions. This accounts for the growing enthusiasm for alternative solutions that extract clean water from the air.

“It is estimated that Earth’s atmosphere contains nearly 13,000 cubic kilometres of water — over six times the volume of the world’s rivers. We cannot exhaust it — it’s always refilled in the process of natural water cycle,” says Tian Li, a materials scientist at Purdue University. And although many of the most promising AWH technologies are still at the stage of lab demonstrations, the field is quickly developing towards real-world systems that produce plentiful amounts of water at low cost.

A team of students, known as Solar Team Eindhoven, in the Netherlands has designed and built a powerful car that’s completely powered by the sun.

Students at Eindhoven University of Technology have been working on solar-powered (太阳能) cars for years. The car they’ve built is called Stella Terra, the first solar-powered car that can travel off-road for long distances. They designed the entire car. On top were the solar panels (电池板). Most solar panels are only about 20％ efficient. That means they waste about 80% of the sunlight they get. But the Stella Terra’s solar panels are 97% efficient. They waste far less sunlight than even the best solar panels you can buy.

Like most electric cars, the Stella Terra stores energy in a battery (电池). Thanks to its powerful solar panels and its battery, when it’s sunny, the car can run for 710 kilometers a day. Stella Terra has a top speed of 145 kph. The car weighs just 1,200 kilograms. That’s about two-thirds the weight of a typical car.

The team recently took the car on its biggest test-1,000-kilometer test drive across Morocco. The car had to travel through forests as well as dry river-beds. It had to drive across desert sand and up steep mountain areas. It succeeded in doing all of this-and all without ever stopping at a charging station.

The team is very proud of their car, but they won’t be upset if car companies start to copy their ideas. In fact, they hope that the Stella Terra will help inspire car companies to work on similar projects. But despite their success, the students think it will take 5 to 10 years before car companies are able to build a similar car and that it needs much money.