House Built From Plastic Bottles

Canadian construction firm JD Composites has completed its first concept home, made from about 612,000 recycled plastic bottles. Dubbed Beach House, the home is located in Nova Scotia, Canada, and is not only a great example of how recycled plastic can be put to good use, but it’s also hurricane resistant. JD Composites co-owners David Saulnier and Joel German came […]

On The Go Carafe

Good news for coffee and tea drinkers: No more wasting time and energy waiting for the perfect cup. Thanks to Heatworks, the company responsible for creating an innovative new heating carafe, you won’t have to. Using patented Heatworks’ Ohmic Array Technology, the DUO Smart Untethered Carafe has the power to heat (or cool!) water to the exact degree while you […]

Soap Packed Bottles Can Be Used As Soaps

Central Saint Martins post-graduate student Mi Zhou has created toiletry bottles called Soapack that are cast from soap and melt away once they are no longer useful. To make each Soapack, vegetable oil-based soap is dyed using pigments from minerals, plants and flowers and formed in a mould, in a process similar to slip-casting ceramics. A thin layer of beeswax […]

General Adaptive Floor Plans

Architecture studio Wallgren Arkitekter and Swedish construction company BOX Bygg have created a parametric design tool called Finch, which can generate floor plans adapted to the constraints of a site. The tool is designed to help architects understand the constraints and potential of a site in the early stages of the design process. Finch will be launched in 2020 as a […]

Airless Tyres

Michelin is partnering with General Motors to bring its airless tyre prototype to the roads, potentially saving 200 million punctured car tyres from the scrap heap annually. The two companies aim to develop Michelin‘s UPTIS (or Unique Puncture-proof Tire System), which promises to eliminate both the waste and the danger that comes from a flat or blown-out tyre, so that it […]

Cold Brew Coffee Maker

Nitro-infusion cold-brew is a big thing among coffee aficionados, but most of us need to go to a specialist coffee shop to get our fix, and it’s not what you’d call cheap. So GrowlerWerks – hot on the heals of its successful launch of the uKeg pressurized beer-growler – has stepped in with another Kickstarter campaign, this time bringing nitro […]

Airless Tyres

Michelin is partnering with General Motors to bring its airless tyre prototype to the roads, potentially saving 200 million punctured car tyres from the scrap heap annually. The two companies aim to develop Michelin‘s UPTIS (or Unique Puncture-proof Tire System), which promises to eliminate both the waste and the danger that comes from a flat or blown-out tyre, so that it […]

Machine Helps Harvest Lettuce

Engineers from the University of Cambridge have developed a vegetable-picking robot that can autonomously identify and harvest iceberg lettuce, one of the more manually demanding crops for human pickers. Vegebot was trained using a machine-learning algorithm that helped it distinguish healthy lettuces ready for harvest, in a variety of different weather conditions. Agricultural harvesting is one area of industry that […]

Stretchy Wearable Tech

Wearable devices can be stuck onto the stick like plasters, using a new method pioneered by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. A combined effort from engineers at the school’s Soft Machines Lab and Morphing Matter Lab, ElectroDermis is a new way to apply electronics to the skin, whether it be for medical, fitness or lifestyle purposes. Where current wearable technology […]

Solein Protein Powder More Climate Friendly

Food tech start-up Solar Foods has created a climate-friendly protein-rich food that uses much less water and land than other animal or plant-based foods. Developed in collaboration with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Solein is made by applying electricity to water to release bubbles of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Living microbes are added […]