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Inventor that harvested fresh water from the sky wins XPRIZE competition

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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.

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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.

Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

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Watch Tesla’s “guardian angel” FSD feature take over for collision evasion

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Tesla’s Automatic Collision Evasion feature can be seen in one of the first owner videos of it in action.

Tesla owner Spencer (@scotsrule08) posted on Monday that the feature “worked flawlessly,” saying FSD reengaged itself just as he was about to hit a curb. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla’s AI team, shared the clip and wrote, “A guardian angel always looking out for you.”

The video arrives in the middle of a staged rollout. Tesla first shipped Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD (Supervised) v14.3.9 in software update 2026.27.6 earlier this month, which Teslarati covered as it reached cars. Update 2026.27.10, which began going out on September 19, carried the feature improvements with FSD v14.3.10, according to release notes tracked by Not a Tesla App. The newer 2026.27.11 build is now reaching another wave of vehicles.


The feature only runs on HW4 vehicles, and it requires an active FSD purchase or subscription with both FSD (Supervised) and Automatic Emergency Braking enabled. HW3 owners receive FSD v14.2 Lite in the same updates, but that build does not include collision evasion.

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Tesla’s release notes describe two triggers. The first is an imminent frontal collision that braking alone may not prevent, in which case the car can activate FSD to steer, brake or accelerate around the hazard. That scenario is limited to highways below 85 mph, with no pedestrians or cyclists detected and no slippery road surface. The second covers a driver who appears inattentive, such as reaching into the back seat, or who seems to have switched off FSD by accident. Spencer’s curb clip appears to fall into that second category.

Tesla plans big safety improvements for Full Self-Driving v15

Once the system takes over, the accelerator is muted and light brake input will not cancel the maneuver. Drivers need to apply firm, deliberate steering force to take back control, and the car chimes to hand control back once the danger has passed.

Elluswamy recently noted that earlier hazard prediction, faster reaction time and better collision avoidance would arrive with FSD v15, the next major version.

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Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig

Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.

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Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”


The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.

This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.

What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.

That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.

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Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production

Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.

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Concept rendering of Tesla Optimus in mass production

Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.

Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.

Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.

New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point

Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.

Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.

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