Drinking

Desalination is an important technology that may help unlock more drinking water, and now two independent teams have developed new types of solar-powered desalination systems using very different mechanisms.

Researchers from the University of California Berkeley have developed a device that can wring drinkable amounts of water out of even the driest air.

​It was six years ago that we first heard about Makr Shakr, a robotic bar that can reportedly mix one Googol (the digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes) drink combinations. Now, its designers are planning on installing the tech in an autonomous vehicle that users can hail whenever they want a bevvy.

Keurig is best known for popularizing the coffee pod machine, but realizing it’s always five o’clock somewhere, the company is now taking the concept out on the town with the Drinkworks Home Bar, which cooks up cocktails (or beer and cider, for some reason) from the same kind of premixed pods.

The drinking straw seems pretty simple and unassuming, but it’s contributing to one of the most pressing environmental problems today. To help cut back on that, a start-up in Singapore is getting ready to launch the Chew, a reusable straw with a “chewable” rubber tip and a spin-dry mechanism.

The Vacanti Spirale is a wine glass with a corkscrew-like twist that captures sediment.​ Given this a problem that would have confronted every other wine-drinking civilization of the last 10,000 years, it's quite astonishing it hasn't been done before.

In areas where clean water isn’t easily accessible, solar stills can help purify available water that might be dirty or salty, but they can be expensive and inefficient. Now, a new type of solar still that uses carbon-coated paper could be cheaper and twice as efficient.

At CES, French wine and spirits company Pernod Ricard is highlighting how hosts of the near-future will mix up refreshing, lounge-grade cocktails using its Opn smart cocktail system that connects the host with ingredients and cocktail recipes, turning him or her into a seasoned mixologist.

As pubs and bars in the UK get busier in the run up to Christmas, Barclaycard has uncorked a way to reduce the time people spend waiting to be served. Pay @ Pump is a beer pump that allows customers to pour their own pint and pay with a contactless card in as little as a minute.

Scientists from Texas A&M identify the neurons in mice that drive them to drink more and curb their drinking habits.

Short of having a robot bartender to pour you the perfect cocktail on a whim, you're probably best off mixing it yourself. The MixStik is designed to help, by showing what measures of each ingredient you need.

In a move that Star Trek's Mister Scott would approve of, Scottish distiller Ballantine’s has developed a glass for sipping whisky in zero gravity. The cleverly conceived Space Glass might well be a more attractive proposition for astronauts than plastic bags and straws.