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Maybe he hasn't figured out all the details to make them technically feasible for mass production yet. But a concept for shoes that generate electricity has earned 22-year-old Vancouver university student Taylor Ward, who describes himself in his resume as "an aspiring experience designer looking to learn, grow and take the world by storm," a slot as one of the five finalists in the Interaction Design Association (IXDA) 2015 Student Design Challenge. He and the other finalists will go to the Interaction15 conference in San Francisco next month to present his idea to a panel of judges. The winner will receive access to research and design tools to help them further develop their idea.
This year's theme was "Envisioning the Wearable City." And while other contestants came up with ideas for clothing that helped guide visitors to places of interest, connect people or enhance women's safety, Ward was thinking green. His idea involves creating clean, renewable energy through something most people do every day: walk.
Inspired by Vancouver's goal to become the greenest city in the world by 2020, Ward proposed a shoe he calls Step. It features insoles that produce energy as the wearer walks through a system of piezoelectric nano-generators and capacitors that capture and store the energy. As the shoes collect energy—over 100w with each step, Ward says—the wearer would go to a transfer station where they would discharge it into wireless charging pads. That energy could then be used to power homes, schools and businesses. Ward proposes placing them in high-traffic areas like transit stations, parks, schools, busy street corners and hockey arenas (this is Canada, after all!)
"Simply walking up to a station and standing in the transfer area would tap out your current raised energy and send it back into our city," he wrote in his proposal. "We could also incentive giving power. Transferring enough power to the right station could land commuters a free coffee, movie tickets, or even a discount to the game."
He said that the shoes wouldn't cost more than a pair of high-end athletic shoes, although the charging stations would require a major funding source.
"Normally piezoeletric sensors are quite inexpensive," he told City Lab. "The difficult part comes down to the capacity that a small capacitor (or series of capacitors) could hold and the cost for those parts. In the end, I would assume that the wearable itself would still be moderately priced, but the real cost would come from transfer stations. Similar charging stations using inductive charging do exist, but to impact a full city with these stations would be the larger investment from city council and urban planners."
The Simon Fraser University student described how Vancouver's density and walkability make it the idea location for his concept.
"Vancouver is one of the only North American cities that does not have a major highway cutting through its center," he said. "This has caused our city to develop a high density of urban living and nomadic culture. Within our core, there are 13,000 residents per square mile, the highest in Canada. Additionally, for the millions that are just outside the city, there are 48 skytrain stops that all lead downtown. So what if we could use our crowded streets of commuting passengers to our advantage?"
"We take approximately 150 million steps in our lifetime," said Ward. "Let’s capture that power."
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Farms with just one or a handful of different crops encourage fewer species of pollinating and pest-controlling insects to linger, ultimately winnowing away crop yields, according to a new study.
Up to half of the detrimental impacts of the "landscape simplification" that monocropping entails come as a result of a diminished mix of ecosystem service-providing insects, a team of scientists reported Oct. 16 in the journal Science Advances.
Monocrop palm oil plantation Honduras.
SHARE Foundation / Flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0
"Our study shows that biodiversity is essential to ensure the provision of ecosystem services and to maintain a high and stable agricultural production," Matteo Dainese, the study's lead author and a biologist at Eurac Research in Bolzano, Italy, said in a statement.
It stands to reason that, with declines in the sheer numbers of insects that ferry pollen from plant to plant and keep crop-eating pests under control, these services will wane as well. But until now, it hasn't been clear how monocultures affect the number and mix of these species or how crop yields might change as a result.
Aiming to solve these questions, Dainese and his colleagues pulled together data from 89 studies cutting across a variety of landscapes, from the tropics of Asia and Africa to the higher latitudes of northern Europe. They tabulated the number of pollinating and pest-controlling insects at these sites — both the absolute number of individuals and the number of species — along with an assessment of the ecosystem services the insects provided.
In almost all of the studies they looked at, the team found that a more diverse pool of these species translated into more pollination and greater pest control. They also showed that simplified landscapes supported fewer species of service-providing insects, which ultimately led to lower crop yields.
The researchers also looked at a third measure of the makeup of insect populations — what they called "evenness." In natural ecosystems, a handful of dominant species with many more individuals typically live alongside a higher number of rarer species. The team found as landscapes became less diverse, dominant species numbers dwindled and rare species gained ground. This resulting, more equitable mix led to less pollination (though it didn't end up affecting pest control).
"Our study provides strong empirical support for the potential benefits of new pathways to sustainable agriculture that aim to reconcile the protection of biodiversity and the production of food for increasing human populations," Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, one of the study's authors and an animal ecologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany, said in the statement.
The scientists figure that the richness of pollinator species explains around a third of the harmful impacts of less diverse landscapes, while the richness of pest-controlling species accounts for about half of the same measure. In their view, the results of their research point to the need to protect biodiversity on and around crops in an uncertain future.
"Under future conditions with ongoing global change and more frequent extreme climate events, the value of farmland biodiversity ensuring resilience against environmental disturbances will become even more important," Steffan-Dewenter said.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Mongabay.