An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: On Dec. 10, 2022, the relatively new cybercrime forum Breached featured a bombshell new sales thread: The user database for InfraGard, including names and contact information for tens of thousands of InfraGard members. The FBI's InfraGard program is supposed to be a vetted Who's Who of key people in private sector roles involving both cyber and physical security at companies that manage most of the nation's critical infrastructures -- including drinking water and power utilities, communications and financial services firms, transportation and manufacturing companies, healthcare providers, and nuclear energy firms. "InfraGard connects critical infrastructure owners, operators, and stakeholders with the FBI to provide education, networking, and information-sharing on security threats and risks," the FBI's InfraGard fact sheet reads.

KrebsOnSecurity contacted the seller of the InfraGard database, a Breached forum member who uses the handle "USDoD" and whose avatar is the seal of the U.S. Department of Defense. USDoD said they gained access to the FBI's InfraGard system by applying for a new account using the name, Social Security Number, date of birth and other personal details of a chief executive officer at a company that was highly likely to be granted InfraGard membership. The CEO in question -- currently the head of a major U.S. financial corporation that has a direct impact on the creditworthiness of most Americans -- did not respond to requests for comment. USDoD told KrebsOnSecurity their phony application was submitted in November in the CEO's name, and that the application included a contact email address that they controlled -- but also the CEO's real mobile phone number. "When you register they said that to be approved can take at least three months," USDoD said. "I wasn't expected to be approve[d]." But USDoD said that in early December, their email address in the name of the CEO received a reply saying the application had been approved. While the FBI's InfraGard system requires multi-factor authentication by default, users can choose between receiving a one-time code via SMS or email. "If it was only the phone I will be in [a] bad situation," USDoD said. "Because I used the person['s] phone that I'm impersonating."

USDoD said the InfraGard user data was made easily available via an Application Programming Interface (API) that is built into several key components of the website that help InfraGard members connect and communicate with each other. USDoD said after their InfraGard membership was approved, they asked a friend to code a script in Python to query that API and retrieve all available InfraGard user data. "InfraGard is a social media intelligence hub for high profile persons," USDoD said. "They even got [a] forum to discuss things." USDoD acknowledged that their $50,000 asking price for the InfraGard database may be a tad high, given that it is a fairly basic list of people who are already very security-conscious. Also, only about half of the user accounts contain an email address, and most of the other database fields -- like Social Security Number and Date of Birth -- are completely empty. [...] While the data exposed by the infiltration at InfraGard may be minimal, the user data might not have been the true end game for the intruders. USDoD said they were hoping the imposter account would last long enough for them to finish sending direct messages as the CEO to other executives using the InfraGuard messaging portal.

The mission of NASA's robotic lander InSight "is nearing an end as dust obscures its solar panels," reports CNN. "In a matter of weeks, the lander won't be able to send a beep to show it's OK anymore."

"Before it bids farewell, though, the spacecraft still has some surprises in store." When Mars rumbled beneath InSight's feet on December 24, NASA scientists thought it was just another marsquake. The magnitude 4 quake was actually caused by a space rock slamming into the Martian surface a couple thousand miles away. The meteoroid left quite a crater on the red planet, and it revealed glimmering chunks of ice in an entirely unexpected place — near the warm Martian equator.
The chunks of ice — the size of boulders — "were found buried closer to the warm Martian equator than any ice that has ever been detected on the planet," CNN explained earlier this week. The article also adds that ice below the surface of Mars "could be used for drinking water, rocket propellant and even growing crops and plants by future astronauts. And the fact that the ice was found so near the equator, the warmest region on Mars, might make it an ideal place to land crewed missions to the red planet." Interestingly, they note that scientists only realized it was a meteoroid strike (and not an earthquake) when "Before and after photos captured from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling Mars since 2006, spotted a new crater this past February." A crater that was 492 feet (150 meters) across and 70 feet (21 meters) deep... When scientists connected the dots from both missions, they realized it was one of the largest meteoroid strikes on Mars since NASA began studying the red planet.... The journal Science published two new studies describing the impact and its effects on Thursday....

"The image of the impact was unlike any I had seen before, with the massive crater, the exposed ice, and the dramatic blast zone preserved in the Martian dust," said Liliya Posiolova, orbital science operations lead for the orbiter at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, in a statement....

Researchers estimated the meteoroid, the name for a space rock before it hits the ground, was about 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters). While this would have been small enough to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, the same can't be said for Mars, which has a thin atmosphere only 1% as dense as Earth's.... Some of the material blasted out of the crater landed as far as 23 miles (37 kilometers) away.

Teams at NASA also captured sound from the impact, so you can listen to what it sounds like when a space rock hits Mars. The images captured by the orbiter, along with seismic data recorded by InSight, make the impact one of the largest craters in our solar system ever observed as it was created.

Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day could be linked to a longer lifespan, new research suggests. When compared with avoiding coffee, it was also associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, the study found. From a report: The findings applied to ground, instant and decaffeinated varieties of the drink, and researchers say they suggest coffee consumption should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle. According to the study, the greatest risk reduction was seen with two to three cups per day. Compared with no coffee drinking, this was associated with a 14%, 27% and 11% lower likelihood of death for decaffeinated, ground and instant preparations, respectively. Study author Professor Peter Kistler of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute, Australia, said: "In this large, observational study ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause. "The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle." The study examined the links between types of coffee and heart rhythms, cardiovascular disease and death using data from the UK Biobank study, which recruited adults between 40 and 69 years of age. Cardiovascular disease was made up of coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure and ischaemic stroke.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: To detect audio deepfakes, we and our research colleagues at the University of Florida have developed a technique that measures the acoustic and fluid dynamic differences between voice samples created organically by human speakers and those generated synthetically by computers.

The first step in differentiating speech produced by humans from speech generated by deepfakes is understanding how to acoustically model the vocal tract. Luckily scientists have techniques to estimate what someone -- or some being such as a dinosaur -- would sound like based on anatomical measurements of its vocal tract. We did the reverse. By inverting many of these same techniques, we were able to extract an approximation of a speaker's vocal tract during a segment of speech. This allowed us to effectively peer into the anatomy of the speaker who created the audio sample.

From here, we hypothesized that deepfake audio samples would fail to be constrained by the same anatomical limitations humans have. In other words, the analysis of deepfaked audio samples simulated vocal tract shapes that do not exist in people. Our testing results not only confirmed our hypothesis but revealed something interesting. When extracting vocal tract estimations from deepfake audio, we found that the estimations were often comically incorrect. For instance, it was common for deepfake audio to result in vocal tracts with the same relative diameter and consistency as a drinking straw, in contrast to human vocal tracts, which are much wider and more variable in shape. This realization demonstrates that deepfake audio, even when convincing to human listeners, is far from indistinguishable from human-generated speech. By estimating the anatomy responsible for creating the observed speech, it's possible to identify the whether the audio was generated by a person or a computer.

Flash floods, wildfires and hurricanes are easy to recognize as ravages of a fast-changing climate. But now, climate change has also emerged as a growing threat to clean, safe drinking water across the country. The New York Times: The deluge that knocked out a fraying water plant in Jackson, Miss., this week, depriving more than 150,000 people of drinking water, offered the latest example of how quickly America's aging treatment plants and decades-old pipes can crumple under the shocks of a warming world. "There's a crisis at hand," said Mikhail V. Chester, a professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering at Arizona State University. "The climate is simply changing too fast, relative to how quickly we could change our infrastructure." Earlier this summer, more than 25,000 people lost their water, some for weeks, after deadly floods ripped through eastern Kentucky, breaking water lines as they obliterated entire neighborhoods.

Utility companies across Texas spent the summer coping with hundreds of water-main breaks as record heat baked and shifted the drought-stricken soil surrounding pipes. This came after a bitter winter storm that plunged Texas into freezing darkness in February 2021 and caused thousands of pipes to burst. And from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast, supercharged hurricanes like Harvey and Ida now regularly debilitate water suppliers, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to boil their water or scramble for bottles days or weeks after the storms pass. This is on top of the slower-moving threats such as rising sea levels that can contaminate water supplies with saltwater, or a Western "mega-drought" that is withering reservoirs and parching the Colorado River that supplies water to some 40 million people.

A small study on the therapeutic effects of using psychedelics to treat alcohol use disorder found that just two doses of psilocybin magic mushrooms paired with psychotherapy led to an 83 percent decline in heavy drinking among the participants. Those given a placebo reduced their alcohol intake by 51 percent. From a report: By the end of the eight-month trial, nearly half of those who received psilocybin had stopped drinking entirely compared with about a quarter of those given the placebo, according to the researchers. The study, published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, is the latest in a cascade of new research exploring the benefits of mind-altering compounds to treat a range of mental health problems, from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder to the existential dread experienced by the terminally ill.

Although most psychedelics remain illegal under federal law, the Food and Drug Administration is weighing potential therapeutic uses for compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA, the drug better known as Ecstasy. Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, director at NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine and the study's lead investigator, said the findings offered hope for the nearly 15 million Americans who struggle with excessive drinking -- roughly 5 percent of all adults. Excessive alcohol use kills an estimated 140,000 people each year.

A combination of psychedelics and therapy appears to help people with alcoholism cut down on the number of days per month they drink heavily, according to a new study. The Verge reports: Researchers used psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, to treat patients over eight months and saw a dramatic improvement in participants' drinking habits. Using psychedelics as treatments for alcoholism was a popular idea in the 1960s and 1970s, and studies on LSD found that it reduced alcohol misuse. But the approach went quiet in the decades after, according to an editorial published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry alongside the new study.

The new research marks a "rekindling of interest," the authors of the editorial wrote. The study included 93 people with alcohol dependence. In the 12 weeks leading up to the study, the participants drank alcohol an average of around 60 days. Of those 60 drinking days, about half were heavy drinking days -- defined as five or more drinks a day for a man and four or more drinks in a day for a woman. People in the trial were randomly assigned to either take a capsule of psilocybin or an antihistamine twice over the course of the 36-week-long study. They had four sessions with therapists before the first time they took the drug, four sessions between the two drug doses, and four sessions after the second drug dose.

Everyone in the study started drinking less after the first four weeks of therapy -- the percentage of heavy drinking days dropped from around half of all drinking days to around a quarter. But that number kept falling for the people who took psilocybin. After the end of the full study, they drank heavily on around 10 percent of the days when they drank. People who took the antihistamine were still drinking heavily on around a quarter of drinking days. The effects lasted for months after the second dose of the psilocybin, study author Michael Bogenschutz, a psychiatrist and director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, stressed during a press briefing. "This suggests that psilocybin is treating the underlying disorder of alcohol addiction rather than merely treating symptoms," he said.

Globally, nearly half of deaths due to cancer can be attributable to preventable risk factors, including the three leading risks of: smoking, drinking too much alcohol or having a high body mass index, a new paper suggests. CNN reports: The research, published Thursday in the journal The Lancet, finds that 44.4% of all cancer deaths and 42% of healthy years lost could be attributable to preventable risk factors in 2019. "To our knowledge, this study represents the largest effort to date to determine the global burden of cancer attributable to risk factors, and it contributes to a growing body of evidence aimed at estimating the risk-attributable burden for specific cancers nationally, internationally, and globally," Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and his colleagues wrote in the study.

The paper, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, analyzed the relationship between risk factors and cancer, the second leading cause of death worldwide, using data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Disease project. The project collects and analyzes global data on deaths and disability. Murray and his colleagues zeroed in on cancer deaths and disability from 2010 to 2019 across 204 countries, examining 23 cancer types and 34 risk factors. The leading cancers in terms of risk-attributable deaths globally in 2019 was tracheal, bronchus and lung cancer for both men and women, the researchers found. The data also showed that risk-attributable cancer deaths are on the rise, increasing worldwide by 20.4% from 2010 to 2019. Globally, in 2019, the leading five regions in terms of risk-attributable death rates were central Europe, east Asia, North America, southern Latin America and western Europe.

The Japanese government has been hit in the pocket by an unusual problem -- its young people aren't drinking enough. From a report: Since the pandemic began, bars and other premises selling alcohol have been hit hard by Covid-19 restrictions, causing sales -- and liquor tax revenues -- to plummet in the world's third-largest economy. The government's solution? Launch a contest to find new ways to encourage young people to drink more. The "Sake Viva!" campaign, overseen by the National Tax Agency, invites participants to submit ideas on how to "stimulate demand among young people" for alcohol through new services, promotional methods, products, designs and even sales techniques using artificial intelligence or the metaverse, according to the official competition website.

"The domestic alcoholic beverage market is shrinking due to demographic changes such as the declining birthrate and aging population, and lifestyle changes due to the impact of Covid-19," said the website, adding that the competition aimed to "appeal to the younger generation ... and to revitalize the industry." The contest includes promotional ideas for all types of Japanese alcohol, with applications open until September 9. Finalists will be invited to an expert consultation in October, before a final tournament in November in Tokyo. The winner will receive support for their plan to be commercialized, according to the tax office.

Rainwater almost everywhere on Earth has unsafe levels of "forever chemicals," according to new research. saulgood shares a report: Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large family of human-made chemicals that don't occur in nature. They are known as 'forever chemicals' because they don't break down in the environment. They have non-stick or stain repellent properties so can be found in household items like food packaging, electronics, cosmetics and cookware. But now researchers at the University of Stockholm have found them in rainwater in most locations on the planet -- including Antarctica. There is no safe space to escape them. Safe guideline levels for some of these forever chemicals have dropped dramatically over the last two decades due to new insights into their toxicity. "There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years," says Ian Cousins, lead author of the study and professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Stockholm University. For one well-known substance, the "cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)," water guideline values have declined by 37.5 million times in the US.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes TechXplore: A widely discussed application of social robots that has so far been rarely tested in real-world settings is their use as bartenders in cafes, cocktail bars and restaurants. While many roboticists have been trying to develop systems that can effectively prepare drinks and serve them, so far very few have focused on artificially reproducing the social aspect of bartending.

Researchers at University of Naples Federico II in Italy have recently developed a new interactive robotic system called BRILLO, which is specifically designed for bartending. In a recent paper published in UMAP '22 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, they introduced a new approach that could allow their robot to have personalized interactions with regular customers.

"The bartending scenario is an extremely challenging one to tackle using robots, yet it is also very interesting from a research point of view," Prof. Silvia Rossi, one of the researchers who carried out the study and the scientific coordinator of the project, told TechXplore. "In fact, this scenario combines the complexity of efficiently manipulating objects to make drinks with the need to interact with the users. Interestingly, however, all current applications of robotics for bartending scenarios ignore the interaction part entirely...."

The innovative system created by this team of researchers allows their robot to process what a human user is telling them and their non-verbal cues, to determine what mood they are in, how attentive they are and what types of drinks they prefer. This information is stored by the robot and used to guide its future interactions with returning customers, so that they also consider their personalities and personal stories, along with their drinking preferences.

1.34 billion people consumed harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020, according to estimates from a new study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It also found that 59.1% of those people consuming unsafe amounts were between the ages of 15 and 39, and that for that group "there are no health benefits to drinking alcohol, only health risks.... 60% of alcohol-related injuries occurring among people in this age group, including motor vehicle accidents, suicides, and homicides."

Of the 15 to 39-year-olds consuming unsafe amounts of alcohol, 76.7% were male. For adults over age 40, health risks from alcohol consumption vary by age and region. Consuming a small amount of alcohol (for example, drinking between one and two 3.4-ounce glasses of red wine) for people in this age group can provide some health benefits, such as reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes...

Authors call for alcohol consumption guidelines to be revised to emphasise consumption levels by age, stressing that the level of alcohol consumption recommended by many existing guidelines is too high for young people in all regions. They also call for policies targeting males under age 40, who are most likely to use alcohol harmfully.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: In May 2021, a celebration for Portsmouth, New Hampshire's new $17m water treatment facility drew local and national officials who declared the city's water free of toxic "forever chemicals." Firefighting foam from the nearby Pease air force base had polluted the water for decades with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and in recognition of the public health threat the US military funded the city's new filtration system. Officials said after implementing the upgraded filtration, testing no longer found detectable levels of PFAS chemicals in the water. They called the work in Portsmouth a "national model" for addressing PFAS water contamination. "We are here to celebrate clean water," Senator Maggie Hassan said at the time. But the water may not be clean after all.

A Guardian analysis of water samples taken in Portsmouth and from eight other locations around the United States shows that the type of water testing relied on by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- and officials in towns such as Portsmouth -- is so limited in scope that it is probably missing significant levels of PFAS pollutants. The undercount leaves regulators with an incomplete picture of the extent of PFAS contamination and reveals how millions of people may be facing an unknown health risk in their drinking water.

The analysis checked water samples from PFAS hot spots around the country with two types of tests: an EPA-developed method that detects 30 types of the approximately 9,000 PFAS compounds, and another that checks for a marker of all PFAS. The Guardian found that seven of the nine samples collected showed higher levels of PFAS in water using the test that identifies markers for PFAS, than levels found when the water was tested using the EPA method -- and at concentrations as much as 24 times greater. "The EPA is doing the bare minimum it can and that's putting people's health at risk," said Kyla Bennett, policy director at the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. "PFAS are a class of chemicals used since the 1950s to make thousands of products repel water, stains and heat," notes the Guardian. "They are often called 'forever chemicals' because they don't fully break down, accumulating in the environment, humans and animals. Some are toxic at very low levels and have been linked to cancer, birth defects, kidney disease, liver problems, decreased immunity and other serious health issues."

"[W]hen it comes to identifying PFAS-contaminated water, the limitations of the test used by state and federal regulators, which is called the EPA 537 method, virtually guarantees regulators will never have a full picture of contamination levels as industry churns out new compounds much faster than researchers can develop the science to measure them," adds the report. "That creates even more incentive for industry to shift away from older compounds: if chemical companies produce newer PFAS, regulators won't be able to find the pollution."

A city in Japan has been forced to apologise after a contractor admitted he had lost a USB memory stick containing the personal data of almost half a million residents after an alcohol-fuelled night out. From a report: Officials in Amagasaki, western Japan, said the man -- an unnamed employee of a private contractor hired to oversee Covid-19 relief payments to local households -- had taken the flash drive from the city's offices to transfer the data at a call centre in nearby Osaka. After spending Tuesday evening drinking at a restaurant, he realised on his way home that the bag containing the drive was missing, along with the personal details of all 460,000 Amagasaki residents. He reported the loss to police the following morning. The information included the residents' names, addresses and dates of birth, as well as details of their residence tax payments and the bank account numbers of those receiving child benefits and other welfare payments, according to the Asahi Shimbun. All of the information is encrypted and password protected, and there have been no reports of data leaks.

Scientists have designed a tiny robot-fish that is programmed to remove microplastics from seas and oceans by swimming around and adsorbing them on its soft, flexible, self-healing body. From a report: Microplastics are the billions of tiny plastic particles which fragment from the bigger plastic things used every day such as water bottles, car tyres and synthetic T-shirts. They are one of the 21st century's biggest environmental problems because once they are dispersed into the environment through the breakdown of larger plastics they are very hard to get rid of, making their way into drinking water, produce, and food, harming the environment and animal and human health.

"It is of great significance to develop a robot to accurately collect and sample detrimental microplastic pollutants from the aquatic environment," said Yuyan Wang, a researcher at the Polymer Research Institute of Sichuan University and one of the lead authors on the study. Her team's novel invention is described in a research paper in the journal Nano Letters. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of such soft robots." Researchers at Sichuan University have revealed an innovative solution to track down these pollutants when it comes to water contamination: designing a tiny self-propelled robo-fish that can swim around, latch on to free-floating microplastics, and fix itself if it gets cut or damaged while on its expedition.

For one brief limited period of time, New Orleans locals "will have a chance to try the first craft beer created by an AI platform," according to a report from local station WGNO: The AI Blonde Ale will be released at a Launch Party at NOLA Brewery on June 20 to coincide with CVPR, the world's premier computer vision event. Derek Lintern, a brewer at NOLA Brewing said he is excited to have a helping hand when it comes to crafting beer.

"It's state-of-the-art technology with the traditional brewing methods, it's pretty unique and it's a recipe I would have never done normally but I really like how it tastes. Its very refreshing and very easy drinking I'm really happy with it," said Lintern....

The technology helps create the recipe, but the beer is still brewed manually.
The name of the company that brought the AI to the brewery? "Deep Liquid.

That morning cup of coffee may be linked to a lower risk of dying, researchers from a study published Monday in The Annals of Internal Medicine concluded. From a report: Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn't drink coffee. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die during the study period, with those drinking about three cups per day having the lowest risk of death when compared with noncoffee drinkers.

Researchers analyzed coffee consumption data collected from the U.K. Biobank, a large medical database with health information from people across Britain. They analyzed demographic, lifestyle and dietary information collected from more than 170,000 people between the ages of 37 and 73 over a median follow-up period of seven years. The mortality risk remained lower for people who drank both decaffeinated and caffeinated coffee. The data was inconclusive for those who drank coffee with artificial sweeteners. "It's huge. There are very few things that reduce your mortality by 30 percent," said Dr. Christina Wee, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a deputy editor of the scientific journal where the study was published. Dr. Wee edited the study and published a corresponding editorial in the same journal.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In late 2019, the government of New South Wales in Australia rolled out digital driver's licenses. The new licenses allowed people to use their iPhone or Android device to show proof of identity and age during roadside police checks or at bars, stores, hotels, and other venues. ServiceNSW, as the government body is usually referred to, promised it would "provide additional levels of security and protection against identity fraud, compared to the plastic [driver's license]" citizens had used for decades.

Now, 30 months later, security researchers have shown that it's trivial for just about anyone to forge fake identities using the digital driver's licenses, or DDLs. The technique allows people under drinking age to change their date of birth and for fraudsters to forge fake identities. The process takes well under an hour, doesn't require any special hardware or expensive software, and will generate fake IDs that pass inspection using the electronic verification system used by police and participating venues. All of this, despite assurances that security was a key priority for the newly created DDL system. "To be clear, we do believe that if the Digital Driver's Licence was improved by implementing a more secure design, then the above statement made on behalf of ServiceNSW would indeed be true, and we would agree that the Digital Driver's Licence would provide additional levels of security against fraud compared to the plastic driver's licence," Noah Farmer, the researcher who identified the flaws, wrote in a post published last week.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have now demonstrated a low-cost gel film that can pull many liters of water per day out of even very dry air. New Atlas reports: The gel is made up of two main ingredients that are cheap and common -- cellulose, which comes from the cell walls of plants, and konjac gum, a widely used food additive. Those two components work together to make a gel film that can absorb water from the air and then release it on demand, without requiring much energy. First, the porous structure of the gum attracts water to condense out of the air around it. The cellulose meanwhile is designed to respond to a gentle heat by turning hydrophobic, releasing the captured water.

In tests, the gel film was able to wring an astonishing amount of water out of the air. At a relative humidity of 30 percent, it could produce 13 L (3.4 gal) of water per day per kilogram of gel, and even when the humidity dropped to just 15 percent -- which is low, even for desert air -- it could still produce more than 6 L (1.6 gal) a day per kilogram. [...] And the new gel film's efficiency could be improved even further, the team says, by creating thicker films, absorbent beds, or other array formations of the material. Perhaps most importantly, the material is extremely inexpensive to produce, costing as little as $2 per kilogram. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

The winner of this year's MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is commercializing a new water desalination technology. MIT News reports: Nona Desalination says it has developed a device capable of producing enough drinking water for 10 people at half the cost and with 1/10th the power of other water desalination devices. The device is roughly the size and weight of a case of bottled water and is powered by a small solar panel. The traditional approach for water desalination relies on a power-intensive process called reverse osmosis. In contrast, Nona uses a technology developed in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics that removes salt and bacteria from seawater using an electrical current.

"Because we can do all this at super low pressure, we don't need the high-pressure pump [used in reverse osmosis], so we don't need a lot of electricity," says Crawford, who co-founded the company with MIT Research Scientist Junghyo Yoon. "Our device runs on less power than a cell phone charger." The company has already developed a small prototype that produces clean drinking water. With its winnings, Nona will build more prototypes to give to early customers. The company plans to sell its first units to sailors before moving into the emergency preparedness space in the U.S., which it estimates to be a $5 billion industry. From there, it hopes to scale globally to help with disaster relief. The technology could also possibly be used for hydrogen production, oil and gas separation, and more.