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One of the new products unveiled at CES this year is a new kind of home security system — one that includes drones to patrol your property, along with sensors designed to mimic garden light and a central processor to bring it all together.

Sunflower Labs debuted their new Sunflower Home Awareness System, which includes the eponymous Sunflowers (motion and vibration sensors that look like simple garden lights but can populate a map to show you cars, people and animals on or near your property in real time); the Bee (a fully autonomous drone that deploys and flies on its own, with cameras on board to live-stream video); and the Hive (a charging station for the Bee, which also houses the brains of the operation for crunching all the data gathered by the component parts).

Roving aerial robots keeping tabs on your property might seem a tad dystopian, and perhaps even unnecessary, when you could maybe equip your estate with multiple fixed cameras and sensors for less money and with less complexity. But Sunflower Labs thinks its security system is an evolution of more standard fare because it “learns and reacts to its surroundings,” improving over time.

Residents of El Talento, a small town in Colombia adjacent to the city of Cúcuta, have been introduced to the GEN-M, Watergen’s medium-scale atmospheric generator that produces water out of air, October 2019. Photo: Courtesy.

JNS.org – An Israeli-made machine that creates fresh drinking water from air was named the “Energy Efficiency Product of the Year” in the 2020 Smart Home Mark of Excellence Awards at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

Presented annually during CES by the Consumer Technology Association, the Mark of Excellence Awards recognize the technology industry’s top smart-home innovations. The water-from-air appliance, named “GENNY,” was manufactured by the Rishon Letzion-based company Watergen.

One day, soldiers could cool down on the military battlefield—preventing heat stroke or exhaustion—by using “wearable air conditioning,” an on-skin device designed by engineers at the University of Missouri. The device includes numerous human health care applications such as the ability to monitor blood pressure, electrical activity of the heart and the level of skin hydration.

The findings are detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unlike similar products in use today or other related concepts, this breathable and waterproof device can deliver personal air conditioning to a through a process called passive cooling. Passive cooling does not utilize electricity, such as a fan or pump, which researchers believe allows for minimal discomfort to the user.

Drastic miniaturization of electronics and ingression of next-generation nanomaterials into space technology have provoked a renaissance in interplanetary flights and near-Earth space exploration using small unmanned satellites and systems. As the next stage, the NASA’s 2015 Nanotechnology Roadmap initiative called for new design paradigms that integrate nanotechnology and conceptually new materials to build advanced, deep-space-capable, adaptive spacecraft. This review examines the cutting edge and discusses the opportunities for integration of nanomaterials into the most advanced types of electric propulsion devices that take advantage of their unique features and boost their efficiency and service life. Finally, we propose a concept of an adaptive thruster.