Crowdfunding the Drinkable Book: a book of silver-doped water-filters for the developing world

Jonathan writes, "The Drinkable Book is a water filter and an instruction manual for how and why to clean drinking water. The drinking paper uses a thick, sturdy sheet of paper embedded with silver nanoparticles, which are lethal for microbes. Funds will go to print 1,000 Drinkable Books and distribute them in Ghana, Haiti, India, and Kenya with water nonprofit Waterislife."

Our goals include: 1) Engage local communities in protecting and cleaning their drinking water. WATERisLIFE has ties to rural communities in Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, and India, where feedback from local folks in these communities will be gathered in Fall 2014 through Winter 2015. "WATERisLIFE is a big believer in "boots on the ground," according to founder Ken Surritte. So the books will go with teams traveling to parts of Africa and India, where they'll hold educational sessions on maintaining a clean water source."

2) Theresa will also explore other filter prototype designs to determine the best way to clean water with this pAge drinking paper technology. While in South Africa, Theresa worked with Corinne, a MS engineering student from Carnegie Mellon University. Corinne has led a group of students to design an emergency water filter using pAge filters. This new filter design also shows great potential, especially for emergency response and disaster relief applications! Initial field studies on this new filter prototype will start at the end of the summer 2014.

3) The number of books needed is many more than Theresa has ever made in the lab, and the production needs to be scaled up.

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New materials officewear: dirt-shedding, hydrophobic, breathing, stretchy, odor-absorbing

Ministry of Supply is a Kickstarter-funded, new-materials-based fashion house that produces clothing (to date, men's business clothing) based on new fabrics with exotic dirt/water-shedding properties, breathability, and stretch/give. A lot of this stuff has already made its way into the sportwear world, but it's pretty new in business wear, and the result is things like no-iron shirts; slacks with invisible, breathable crotch-venting; odor-absorbing socks and so forth. The slacks don't get wet in rain and are stretchy ("more elastic than cotton but not as stretchy as spandex"). Read the rest