Review of gadgets and inventions 2023

How can an SUV travel 1000 km without fuel? How to set up a shrimp breeding container? How to breathe underwater without heavy and complex equipment? How to make coffee without using coffee beans? What should a robot wolf look like to be good at scaring away wild animals? Kommersant continues to talk about new and old inventions with great potential.

And instead of a tank there is a solar motor

Just the other day, successful tests of the world’s first SUV powered by solar energy and capable of covering significant distances without recharging were completed. The test drive took place in northern Africa, where the two-seater Stella Terra SUV drove 1000 km through very difficult terrain. The car was developed by students of the Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands), united as part of an innovative project Solar Team Eindhoven and took a sabbatical for this purpose.

The inventors, aged 21 to 25, are on a mission to bridge the gap between technological innovation and everyday life, quickly implement ideas, and accelerate the transition to an environmentally responsible future.

The sun, the inventors note, is a powerful source of energy: in just one hour, the Sun provides as much energy to the Earth as the entire world cannot use in a year. The team decided to use some of this energy.

The Stella Terra has solar panels on its roof that provide energy to the vehicle. During testing, the solar energy converter for them showed an efficiency of 97%, which is a third more than the developers themselves expected. Stella Terra weighs just 1,200 kg, can reach speeds of up to 145 km/h, and has a minimum range of 710 km, provided the sky is not overcast. In case of bad weather, the car has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

According to project leader Wisse Bos, they wanted Stella Terra to be able to cope with difficult terrain, but to be efficient and light enough to have solar power to propel it. “So we had to develop almost everything for it ourselves: from the suspension to the converters. We are pushing the boundaries of technology,” he said. The inventors hope that Stella Terra will “inspire car manufacturers such as Land Rover and BMW to make the industry greener.”

A bottle in your teeth and you’re good to go

Melbourne resident David Hollamore, a passionate scuba diving enthusiast, came up with a way to make diving accessible to anyone without the need to undergo special, expensive training or take bulky equipment with them. The diving tank he created – the size of a sports bottle – allows you to stay under water for up to ten minutes.

Several years ago, while searching for convenient diving equipment, David remembered that a long time ago he had seen in the popular television series “Baywatch” something like a mini-cylinder that was enough for a five-minute dive. But when he tried to find a cylinder for sale, it turned out that they simply did not exist. I had to invent it myself, and at the same time open a company to sell the invention, called SCORKL. Funds were raised through crowdfunding. The idea inspired many, and in a few days more than $175 thousand was raised – five times more than needed.

A cylinder with a special cap with a valve, a pressure sensor and a mouthpiece is attached under the diver’s chin and, due to its size, does not interfere with swimming.

With the SCORKL cylinder you can go down to a depth of 20 meters, although the developer recommends staying within ten meters, and for beginners – three meters.

The cylinder comes with a hand pump, similar to the one used to inflate bicycle tires. But it is similar only in appearance; its device allows you to pump enough air into the cylinder for a ten-minute dive. The process of filling the cylinder using a pump takes about 12 minutes. And you can fill SCORKL in 30 seconds using a regular large diving tank.

In addition, David Hallamore’s team refined the idea and launched a portable compressor that makes pumping air much easier and can be used for other needs. All this equipment can be transported by any means of transport, including by plane, which is convenient for travel. Since SCORKL went on sale, it has been purchased by thousands of people in 65 countries.

Coffee from all sorts of things, standing guard over forests

Due to global climate change, coffee producers are forced to move plantations higher into the mountains, where it is cooler, and this requires cutting down forests. It turns out to be a vicious circle, because deforestation only increases climate change. And research shows that by 2050, almost half of the land currently grown for coffee will become infertile.

To break this circle, specialists from the startup Atomo (Seattle, USA) have developed innovative coffee: it does not need to be grown on plantations and, accordingly, forests are not cut down for these plantations. According to Atomo CEO Andy Kleitsch, in order to grow coffee trees, forests are cut down every day in an area comparable in size to ten Central Parks in New York (the park area is 341 hectares). “This is a machine, a coffee machine, that never stops and constantly requires more and more land. And that’s exactly what we want to stop,” he says.

Atomo’s developers took the molecular structure of coffee and assembled it from elements of 28 different plants and foods, including date pits, sunflower seeds, pea protein, millet, defatted fenugreek seeds, lemon, guava, fructose and caffeine.

The product, collected from a little bit of everything, is roasted like regular coffee beans, then ground and brewed – also like regular coffee. It tastes exactly the same as regular coffee, and, as connoisseurs note, there are notes of dark chocolate, dried fruit and wholemeal crackers. At the same time, Atomo coffee has lower acidity and a higher content of antioxidants, which is beneficial for health and reduces the darkening of tooth enamel.

The developers claim that the production of such coffee produces much less harmful emissions (by 93%) and requires 94% less water than the production of regular bean coffee. The advantages of this development were also appreciated by the magazine’s experts. TIMEwho included Atomo coffee in the list of the best inventions of 2022.

Very scary gray wolf

Japanese company Wolf Kamuy invented effective protection of crops from wild animals. Her Super Monster wolf robot has proven to be so effective that it is now used not only to protect crops, but also to protect farmers themselves, as well as residents of remote villages, from wild animals. The wolf robot looks truly scary: raised fur, bared mouth, eyes glowing red. The dimensions are similar to those of an ordinary wolf: body length 120 cm, height 80 cm.

To be more convincing, the robot moves head and produces a growl with a volume of 90 decibels, audible up to a kilometer away. And so that wild animals cannot get used to such sounds and stop being afraid, the “wolf” has more than 50 different types of frightening sounds, including dog barking or gunshots. The robot is mounted on a wheeled structure and equipped with infrared sensors that respond to the appearance of wild animals.

The first successful tests of the “super monster” took place in the Japanese city of Takikawa in the fall of 2020. After becoming familiar with the model, some Japanese municipalities saw the robot as a possible protector for residents of remote villages.

As more and more Japanese people move from rural areas to cities in recent decades, villages are becoming empty and wild animals, especially bears, are not afraid to approach homes and even attack people. In 2021 alone, on the island of Hokkaido, four people became victims of bears, and ten people were injured from encounters with wild animals. According to authorities, there are now about 12 thousand brown bears and about 10 thousand Himalayan bears in Japan. Tests of the Super Monster robot wolf have shown that bears run away from it with the same agility as roe deer, wild boars and other wild animals. Therefore, Wolf Kamuy now produces “wolves” to protect people.

Shrimp from a box

Every year, 4 million tons of shrimp are eaten worldwide. Catching such quantities involves serious damage to the environment. Shrimp are bottom-dwellers, and to catch them you need to drag large nets along the bottom. Accordingly, along with shrimp, everything is caught, including turtles, seahorses, rare species of fish, etc. For every kilogram of shrimp caught, there are six to nine kilograms of other biological species. The shrimp farms being created solve one problem by creating others: the farms require huge amounts of water, which during shrimp farming is saturated with chemicals and antibiotics, and then poured back into the sea.

Experts from an American startup found a comprehensive solution to the problem. Atarraya. They proposed breeding shrimp in regular shipping containers.

One container 12 meters long, constructed using modern technology, allows the production of 1.5 tons of shrimp per year. Growing the same amount on a farm would require occupying 8 hectares of the seabed.

Containers take up less space because they can be stacked in several rads. In addition, the technology does not require the use of chemicals and antibiotics.

Inside the container, ideal conditions are created for shrimp breeding, and built-in sensors measure and automatically regulate the oxygen concentration in the water, water temperature, the balance of acids and alkalis, the degree of turbidity and other indicators. The data is transmitted to the control center in Atarraya.

If necessary, the container maintenance system receives instructions that are executed automatically. Maintaining all parameters can be programmed for a long period. The presence of employees is only necessary to monitor the operation of electrical and mechanical equipment, as well as to feed the shrimp. Now the company is engaged in breeding only one, albeit quite large, species – whiteleg shrimp. It takes three to four months to remove them. But the developers claim that other types of marine fauna, including fish and lobsters, can be bred in this way.

Alena Miklashevskaya