It’s also, much to no one’s great surprise, an enormous crowdfunding hit, recently pulling in almost $346,000 USD on Indiegogo. It’s being billed as the world’s first self-filling water bottle, and while it may sound too good to be true, but it’s 100% real. Most recently, Fontus, a start up company out of Austria, has created the Airo – a bottle that quite literally creates water - totally potable, live-saving water to the tune of half a litre an hour - out of thin air. However, man is no dummy, and we’ve made quite a few strides to help our own cause of self preservation. The cold, the sea, the lack of viable sustenance: man succumbs to it all, and nature simply exhales and waits for the next fool who wants to test his mettle. It has a long way to go before it can truly help people in water scarce areas, but innovative projects that force us to rethink how we live always generate some excitement.You don’t have to be an avid reader of Jack London or any other Naturalist literature to know that in the age-old battle of man versus nature, it never ends well for man. Next the company hopes to launch a crowdfunding campaign and get the price of the water bottle under $100, Chow writes. The project was shortlisted for the 2014 James Dyson Award. They also may also install a carbon filter to deal with particulates in the air: Already the bottle has a basic filter to keep out bugs and dirt, but works best in the relatively pristine air of natural environments. In the future, Retezár says the company hopes to improve that so the bottle can work in more conditions. In "really good" conditions, or temperatures between 86 and 104 degrees with humidity between 80 and 90 percent, the Fontus can generate half a liter of water in an hour, Chow reports for Livescience. One version of the design, the Ryde, takes advantage of air flow on a bike, producing water as the user rides. Hikers can use another version called the Airo, which uses a small fan to create the air flow. That means that the air passing through the cold chamber rapidly condenses like droplets on the outside of a cold glass. Air flows into both these chambers separately, but when air passes over the hot side, the slight cooling of that chamber causes the cold chamber to chill even more. This leaves two chambers: one cold and the other hot. This condenser creates a temperature differential drawing heat from one side of the device to the other. The Fontus uses solar energy to power a small cooler or condenser that works by the so-called Peltier effect. " That means you would always potentially be able to extract that humidity from the air." "You always have a certain percentage of humidity in the air, it doesn't matter where you are-even in the desert," Retezár tells Denise Chow at Livescience. Another 1.6 live in countries where water infrastructure and storage is lacking. Engineers have long hoped to help water-scarce regions by achieving this goal. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs reports that 1.2 billion people, around a fifth of the world's population, live in areas where water is physically scarce. The water bottle comes from Austrian industrial designer Kristof Retezár, who wanted to make a simple, portable tool to help people where drinkable water isn't easy to get. Fontus is a water bottle that pulls moisture from the air, and in ideal conditions, can fills itself up in under an hour, reports Chris Weller for Tech Insider. What if we could diversify and pull water from the air, instead? People get most of their water from rivers, which make up only 0.49 percent of surface freshwater. But much of that freshwater is locked up as ice in glaciers, ice caps and permafrost. Geological Survey puts all of the world's freshwater at just 2.5 percent of the total global water. Only a fraction of the Earth's water is drinkable-an estimate from the U.S.
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