Lifestyle
Inventor that harvested fresh water from the sky wins XPRIZE competition
At the annual Visioneering 2018 gathering in Los Angeles, the team at XPRIZE formally announced their grand prize Water Abundance competition winner: Skysource/Skywater Alliance, a company now $1.5 million dollars richer for developing a sustainable way to harvest drinking water from the sky.
The rules of the competition were strict: The teams’ devices had to extract 2,000 liters of water from the air per day using 100% renewable energy for a maximum of two cents per liter. Rising to the challenge of the narrow parameters, 98 teams submitted proposals, and five had ideas that made it to the final round before the winner was chosen after the two-year time frame allotted for development.
Having an on-demand water supply anywhere air is available may sound like a cool idea in itself, but why exactly was XPRIZE involved in making the idea arguably even better?
The scene has already been set in numerous cartoons and films: It’s hot, the middle of nowhere (most likely a desert), and the main character is in desperate need of water. Then, suddenly, an oasis appears in the distance, offering the salvation of a beautiful body of blue liquid complete with a palm tree for shade. As in many of those same scenarios where the oasis turns out to be a mirage, such a water supply doesn’t exist in underprivileged parts of the world. More than that, according to Water.org, there’s a scarcity that has grown to the tune of 844 million people living without access to safe drinking water. The team at XPRIZE took up this issue head-on with this competition, the oases being akin to the competitors’ devices.
As amazing as the concept of harvesting water from the sky is, it’s not new technology. With directly relevant patents dating back to at least 1926 (U.S. Patent No. 1,816,592), innovation-minded people have long recognized that, since the air we breathe is full of the same molecules that make up what we drink, there should be an easy way to tap into it via engineering. After all, grade school science classes taught us about the liquid-to-gas transformation of H2O (as does forgetting about boiling water on the stove), so the reverse concept of an air-to-water device might seem plausible.
If you live in a region where rainy seasons and basements co-exist, the workings of a dehumidifier may have also crossed your mind while contemplating the concept of removing moisture from the air. Also, even the winner of the XPRIZE Water Abundance competition owns multiple patents directed to this technology and is already in the marketplace with their Atmospheric Water Generation (AWG) products, or rather, manufactured “rainwater in a box”. It has even had celebrity clients to date and has been providing its technology to governments, militaries, and emergency relief efforts around the world.
So, why then, was this idea in need of a million-dollar-plus prize?
The difference brought on by the XPRIZE was the accessibility of the technology. Namely, the high energy needs of the systems historically put areas without access to such energy at a great disadvantage towards tapping into its potential. Skysource/Skywater Alliance made a key development to meet the requirements of the competition in adapting their products to produce water via sustainable, low-cost power methods like solar panels and biomass gasifiers. As specified, their modified devices operate on 100% renewable, affordable energy sources.
Thanks to motivation brought on by the Water Abundance competition, clean drinking water may soon be within reach of populations at most risk from water shortages. As for the rest, moving a little more in the direction of sustainability for consumables is a win-win for all.
Lifestyle
Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory
Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.
Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.
The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.
Tailgate Utility Trackhttps://t.co/PCAYXlFBvS pic.twitter.com/sCV2NVxf1W
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 3, 2026
The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.
Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.
Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
Lifestyle
Police sergeant recounts his Neuralink journey with Elon Musk’s brain chip
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
