Making a primitive battery from salt water and a bit of metal is a pretty common science experiment, but how about using the concept on a larger scale for the good of the planet? Engineer and environmental activist Aisa Mijeno created a lamp that uses this eco-friendly, renewable energy to provide light to homes with no electricity.

The SALt (Sustainable Alternative Lighting) lamp uses just one cup of water and two teaspoons of salt to provide light for eight hours. The lamp is meant as an alternative to kerosene lamps, which are the standard in most electricity-free homes in the Philippines. Kerosene lamps are dangerous due to fumes and to the fire hazard, but many households have no other option after the sun goes down.

SALt uses a galvanic cell battery; it involves two electrodes placed into the saltwater solution. One electrode discharges electrons and the other picks them up, thus creating a current that can be harnessed to light the bulb in the top part of the lamp. The lamp also has a USB port on the side that the inventor says receives enough power to charge a smartphone.

Like all other batteries, this one will eventually wear out. But according to Mijeno, the battery should last for a good six months even if you run the light eight hours a day, every day. Then it’s just a matter of replacing the anode, not the entire lamp, to make it run like new again.

If you live on the coast, you don’t even have to worry about mixing up a saltwater solution – just grab some ocean water and pour it in the chamber in the bottom of the lamp. You’ll get the same performance as you would with a homemade salt + water solution. Mijeno and the rest of the team behind SALt hope to launch their product by providing 600 of the lamps to Philippine towns. After that, they plan to bring it to market so anyone with access to water and salt can have a simple, safe, portable source of light.

The post Now Sea Here: This Lamp Runs on Nothing But Salt and Water first appeared on Gajitz.

Finding a place to charge your phone or tablet when you’re away from home often involves ducking into a café or carrying a supplementary battery around with you. Israeli company Sologic created a truly lovely way to capture natural solar energy and provide free charging stations to the public.

The chargers are called eTrees because they look like high-tech futuristic trees. Their “leaves” are solar panels which are always grabbing energy from the sun. Their trunks are brown to simulate the look of real trees.

The first eTree was installed in a nature reserve in Israel. At its base are USB ports for charging gadgets and benches for taking a few minutes to relax. A small amount of lighting beneath the tree provides a bit of illumination for finding the charging ports.

Sologic sees the eTree as a public sculpture that promotes the use of sustainable energy. Its ready availability to the public is a great resource that is not only useful but helps cut down, however slightly, on the amount of non-renewable energy used to charge mobile gadgets every day.

The post Public Phone Chargers Are Artificial Solar-Powered Trees first appeared on Gajitz.

Alternative energy sources are becoming more amazing every year, and Mercedes Benz has just revealed a surprising new power boost for its future generations of vehicles: paint. The high-tech “multi-voltaic silver” paint uses two methods to generate power. First, it acts as an all-over solar panel to capture the power of the sun that’s almost always hitting your car.

Second, the paint harnesses the wind moving across the body of the car. The movement of the wind creates power through electrostatic charging. The car is powered by more conventional methods, as well. It features an internal combustion engine that powers the front wheels while the rear wheels boast an electric engine.

The Mercedes Benz Vision G-Code SUV is purely a concept – an exploration of the types of power that will power tomorrow’s vehicles. As if the high-tech paint weren’t fascinating enough, the G-Code is also designed with two electric scooters included in the back compartment so you can scoot that last mile or two to your destination instead of circling for 20 minutes looking for a parking spot.

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When we think of alternative energy, we usually think of the big players: solar, wind, geothermal, and the like. But there are some alternative energy sources that we rarely consider. Dutch designer Teresa van Dongen explores one of these alternatives in her bioluminescent lamp called Ambio.

Ambio consists of a glass tube half-filled with an “artificial seawater medium,” counterbalanced by two brass weights. The seawater contains a photobacterium species harvested by taking a scraping from the skin of octopi found at a fish market. The tube is capped off with thick wool that allows oxygen to enter the chamber.

When the bacteria are agitated and provided with oxygen, they glow an otherworldly blue color. By gently nudging one of the brass weights, the tube begins to gently sway, waking up the glowing bacteria inside. For a short time, the lamp provides a perfectly electricity-free light source.

The project is compelling and completely beautiful, but there are problems. The bacteria tend to either run out of food or overpopulate the container fairly quickly, putting an end to the display within about two days. The students from TU Delft who helped van Dongen work on the lamp are currently working on prolonging the lifespan of the bacteria so the living lamp can survive longer.

The post Living Lights: Sea Bacteria Make This Swinging Lamp Glow first appeared on Gajitz.

Whether or not you’ve jumped on the electric cars bandwagon already, the chances are that we will all have to switch to non-fossil fuel cars in the future. Unless they’re being charged with solar power, electric cars are still consuming fossil fuels from the grid, anyway. An entirely new way of thinking about fuel inspired a company called Nanoflowcell to develop a car powered by what appears to be a salt water-powered fuel cell.

The Quant e-Sportlimousine is being touted as the world’s first salt water powered car. The technology is surprisingly simple: two liquids are combined, with metallic salts acting as electrolytes. This creates an electrochemical reaction. The solution is pumped through two separate cells to induce “cold burning,” a process that produces electrical power. The setup is known as a flow cell battery.

Although their feasibility has been questioned by some, flow cell batteries are far superior to the lead-acid or lithium-ion batteries currently used in electric vehicles. They can take a vehicle 20 times farther than a lead-acid battery or five times farther than a lithium ion battery. Unlike conventional batteries which require a long time to recharge, all that is needed to recharge flow cell batteries is an exchange of the spent electrolyte-rich fluid for new, charged fluid.

The e-Sportlimousine is still under development, but it recently got approval for road testing in Germany. It has been in development for 14 years and, besides its impressive technology, is just plain handsome with its gull wing doors and modern streamlined interior. Its makers claim that it can travel up to 600 kilometers (about 373 miles) on a single tank of salty fuel and can reach speeds of over 200 MPH. With the first prototype having been declared safe to roam the German roads, the race is now on for the company to produce and test more prototypes while refining their technology.

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