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.

If you find yourself checking your phone first thing in the morning, if you find you're text-messaging while walking, checking your phone instead of working on an important assignment—you are addicted.

Don't worry. The new NoPhone might be just the thing you need, It looks and feels exactly like a smart phone, but it does nothing. It's just a piece of plastic that you can carry around in your hand to fool yourself.

Nophone is currently a prototype (手机模型) that will cost only $12 once it hits the market. Its makers are trying to raise $30,000 in order to cover the production and marketing costs.

Dutch designer Ingmar Larsen, who helped create the NoPhone, said that he had the idea as a joke along with his friends Van Gould and Ben Langveld. To their great surprise, the idea received a lot of attention online and people from all over the world started placing requests for NoPhone of their own, so that's when the three friends decided to raise money for mass production.

David H said, “I used to sleep with my phone in my hand, but my night terrors would cause me to throw it across the room in an unconscious panic. With the NoPhone, I can still enjoy the comfort of holding a phone in my sleep, without waking up to a broken screen. Thanks, NoPhone.”

If you're interested in NoPhone, but concerned about not being able to take selfies anymore, don't worry. The makers do have an update at no extra charge—the mirror sticker. That way, they say, you can enjoy “Yreal-time” selfies with your friends when they're standing right behind you.

Scientists have recently developed a method to 3D-print greener buildings using local soil that they say has the potential to revolutionize the construction industry.

Sarbajit Banerjee, a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at Texas A & M University, said 3D printing was extensively used and allowed them to print entire architectural facades (正面), although getting such structures to meet existing building regulations remained a significant challenge.

Concrete remains the primary material used in many construction projects but it cannot be recycled and requires a lot of energy to mix and transport. The research team’s aim is to print structures using the type of soil that can be found in any garden.

“While the widespread use of concrete has made housing accessible and enabled the growth of cities, this has come at a considerable environmental cost,” said Banerjee.

The move to 3D-print concrete threatens to worsen this problem. However, we imagine a new example of construction that uses naturally sourced materials. Using such materials will further pave the way for building designs that are specifically adapted to the needs of the local climate.

What’s more, the use of local materials would reduce the need to transport concrete long distances, further reducing the environmental impact of the buildings.

The research team’s plan to replace concrete with the earth beneath our feet depends on their ability to improve the soil’s ability to stand the weight of the whole house, to which Banerjee said “they are making excellent progress”.

Once they have a clearer idea of the limits of the technology, Banerjee and his team plan to further investigate how it might allow for building on other planets. For instance, they have worked on addressing the problem of building all-weather roads in the subarctic (亚北极区). They hope the technology could one day be used beyond Earth, to create settlements on the moon or even Mars.