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Thousands of people get lost in the desert every year, but these otherworldly solar beacons could save them

They look like save checkpoints in a video game, and they kind of are.

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Solar-powered beacons in the Saudi Arabian desert guide lost travelers to water.

Chief among my worries as a kid was what I considered the high probability that at some point in my life I would be trapped in quicksand. It felt extremely important that I remember all the tricks and techniques for getting out — just in case! A close second would have to be getting lost in the desert and dying of dehydration. You absolutely had to watch out for those deadly mirages, where the light on the horizon bends in such a way that you're certain you can see water up ahead.

At least one of those fears was fairly well-founded. All jokes aside, the desert is an incredibly dangerous place. It turns out that thousands of people get lost and go missing in deserts across the world every year. The Sahara Desert, the largest hot desert in the world, claimed a staggering 8,000 lives alone in 2023. These aren't overly flippant explorers, for the most part. Many migrants fleeing conflict zones across the desert become lost and suffer a tragic fate while trying to navigate the 3.6 million square mile area. There are many things that make the desert deadly, but dehydration with no access to water is at the top.

A team in Saudi Arabia has been testing a new technology that could drastically reduce dehydration-related deaths in the country's Al-Nafud Desert, and it looks like something straight out of a video game.

Though the Al-Nafud desert is quite a bit smaller than the Sahara standing at about 25,000 square miles, it can still be daunting to cross. Most years, hundreds of people go missing with several dozen of them perishing in the process.

An explorer named Mohammad Fohaid Al-Sohaiman had a brilliant idea to help lost travelers find water. Having been rescued in the desert himself, even as an experienced survivalist and outdoorsman, he knew there had to be a better way.

“Many people lost their lives in the desert near water resources because they did not know that water resources were close to them,” he told Arab News.

The idea: Beacons made of laser light, shot directly into the sky near water sources such as water wells. These powerful lights could be seen from miles away and would be powered by solar panels, ensuring they never go dark.

The plan is to eventually install 100 of the beacons throughout the Saudi Arabian desert.

The program to install the life-saving beacons began in 2021. It's still getting attention and inspiring awe all over the world.

A recent viral Reddit thread highlighted the innovative laser lights, and users were impressed:

"Absolutely brilliant! The rest of the world should immediately begin to implement this system in their desert areas as well as open oceans where water, food and communication devices could be stored for boaters in distress."

"This is such an amazing idea."

Others joked to the beams look like "save points" or "checkpoints" in a video game. They're not wrong!

Some have criticized the beacons, however, claiming that the light pollution may harm the desert's natural environment and residents like nocturnal animals and insects.



The desert holds vast potential for solar power due to its massive open spaces and plentiful sunlight. In fact, solar farms are common in deserts all over the world.

However, there are a couple of limitations that stop us from covering all the world's deserts in solar panels and completely converting to solar energy.

First, people underestimate how destructive and harsh the desert environment really is. Sand is incredibly corrosive, especially when whipped around in high-powered sandstorms. Maintaining solar equipment in the desert is incredibly challenging and costly.

Second, we think of deserts as open wasteland, but that's a misnomer. They're actually incredibly biodiverse natural habitats, home to many different forms of plant, animal, bird, and insect life. The desert habitat is no less important to preserve than rainforests or oceans.

Third, while solar energy is generally considered incredibly eco-friendly, massive solar farms can actually put off quite a bit of heat. A desert-sized solar farm would emit so much heat that it could negatively contribute to global warming and have devastating effects.


In any case, the life-saving beacons are a genius idea and a fantastic use of solar technology. Once the program is fully rolled out, it could save dozens or even hundreds of lives every year.

Just imagine a similar operation conducted in the massive Sahara Desert, or even in remote stretches of the American southwest.

As one commenter stated perfectly, "Now this is the type of innovation for the future I can get behind."

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People are baffled over this machine that sorts out green tomatoes in a mere second

The automated sorter technology is fascinating, as is watching it work in slow motion.

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An automated green tomato sorting machine is mesmerizing in slow motion.

For thousands of years, people around the world have been honing the art of agriculture. For the vast majority of human history, people planted and harvested and sorted produce largely by hand, gradually developing tools and machines over time that would make farming more efficient.

Many crops still have to be harvested and/or sorted by hand, but thanks to a rather mind-blowing machine, tomatoes aren't one of them. A machine that harvests tomatoes saves a ton of time and labor, but as tomatoes don't all ripen at the same time, pulling up an entire tomato plant results in a good number of green ones getting into the mix.

One solution to this problem would be to have the tomatoes transported down a conveyor belt in a factory while workers spot and remove the green ones by hand. However, an automated green tomato sorter does it right in the field as the tomatoes are being harvested, and a whole lot faster than any person ever could.

How many humans would it take to separate 32 green tomatoes from red ones in a single second? Um, a lot.

We'll get to the technology of how it works in a minute, but first you have to see the sorter work in slow motion. The machine is so fast you can't even really see what it's doing until you slow it down, but when you do, the wow factor is awesome. There are occasional misses, of course, but for how fast it's going, the accuracy is remarkable—and impressive to watch.

As James Vincent put it in The Verge, "It’s sorting tomatoes, but it looks like the fingers of God flicking damned souls straight into hell." Check this out:

So many immediate questions:

What?!?

How?!?

How does it know which tomatoes are green?

How does it work so precisely and freakishly fast to flick them away?

Am I the only one with a sudden urge to play Fruit Ninja?

The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation dove into a few of those questions with Don Douglas, president of Weco, a company that builds the optical technology behind the sorter. Douglas explained that light is used to create a reflection off the tomatoes and a sensor connected to software determines which tomatoes are green using that reflection.

It's actually tech that's been used for decades, but it's obviously been perfected and optimized over the years. Watch the machine at work and hear Douglas explain how it does what it does:

It's not always better to have machines do work humans can do, and there's certainly plenty of reason to be concerned about human labor being replaced by machines. But when that labor is back-breaking and tedious, technology can be a big help. Some inventions are also such prime examples of human innovation and ingenuity, you just have to marvel at them—even if they're just sorting green tomatoes from red ones.


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Our lives would look very different without these items invented by women.

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Maybelline New York Beauty & Beyond

Coffee filters. Dishwashers. Hair brushes. Windshield wipers. Computer programming language. Try to imagine how your day would go without these things.

Unless you live in a cabin in the woods and couldn't care less about modern conveniences (in which case, you're probably not reading this), the answer is "not well."

Think about it: Getting ready for work probably took people 10 times as long without paper filters to make coffee, hair brushes to tame bed-head, or windshield wipers for safe driving in storms. Then, of course, once you finally got to there, you'd be doing all your research, correspondence, and clerical work without the help of a computer.

Anyone else hyperventilating yet?

[rebelmouse-image 19477745 dam="1" original_size="700x478" caption="Even Oscar Wilde didn't find it amusing. Photo via Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]Even Oscar Wilde didn't find it amusing. Photo via Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wikimedia Commons.

The reason life no longer looks like that time-consuming nightmare is because a number of brilliant women invented things to help make our day-to-day a whole lot easier.

Here's a look at five of them.

1. Melitta Bentz streamlined the coffee-making process.

[rebelmouse-image 19477746 dam="1" original_size="700x363" caption="Bentz and her marvelous invention. Photo by Otto Sarony/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]Bentz and her marvelous invention. Photo by Otto Sarony/Wikimedia Commons.

You know how those nifty little paper sleeves keep coffee grinds out of your morning (afternoon, evening) cup o' Joe? Well that's all thanks to Melitta Bentz, a German woman who figured out that using paper instead of cloth to filter coffee is much more efficient.

Before she patented her invention in 1908, people used to put coffee grinds in a small cloth bag, which then went into boiling water. This often resulted in some gritty residue at the bottom of a cup of coffee. But by using a piece of paper from her son's notebook and a pot with a few holes punched in it, Benz prevented that effect. She also essentially invented the pour over method, which coffee lovers uphold to this day.

2. Mary Anderson made car travel much safer.

[rebelmouse-image 19477747 dam="1" original_size="700x350" caption="Anderson and a sketch of her "window cleaning device." Photos via Wikimedia Commons and the U.S. Patent Office." expand=1]Anderson and a sketch of her "window cleaning device." Photos via Wikimedia Commons and the U.S. Patent Office.

It seems fitting that the windshield wiper was invented by a woman who was annoyed at being stuck in New York City traffic.

Anderson was visiting the bustling city in 1902 and decided to take a streetcar because it was snowing. However, the driver kept having to get out of the car to wipe off the windshield, which delayed her travel further. And that's when she thought, "If only there were some device that could wipe away precipitation and allow drivers to remain in their cars."

When she got home, she drew a sketch of the first windshield wiper. A year later, she had a patent for what she called a "window cleaning device."

3. Mabel Williams helped girls pump up their eyelashes.

Photo via Maybelline.

For a long time, women weren't able to do much to make their eyelashes appear longer and fuller, though many had used a variety of ingredients in an attempt to try.

So in 1915, a woman named Mabel Williams mixed coal dust, vaseline and oils for sheen to create one of the first mascaras.  Her brother saw the potential and developed a mail-order brush called Lash-Brow-Ine and launched the company — the Maybell Laboratories in Chicago.

The product caught on through print advertising, and two years later, Williams used it to launch the beauty brand — Maybelline — which might sound familiar.

4. Grace Hopper is part of the reason computers do what we want them to do (for now, anyway).

Hopper working with UNIVAC I — the first commercial electronic computer. Photo via The Smithsonian/Wikimedia Commons.

The reason computers work for us is because we feed them instructions that are then translated into code. Hopper led the team that's responsible for the first program that did that.

After she joined the U.S. Navy during World War II, she was assigned to work on the Mark I computer at Harvard. Her team created the first computer language compiler, which was the precursor for the Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL, that would end up becoming a computer language used worldwide.

Of course today, computers are teaching us a thing or two, but none of their complexity would be possible without this first, pivotal step.

5. Lyda Newman designed a much more useful hairbrush.

[rebelmouse-image 19477750 dam="1" original_size="986x758" caption="Lyda Newman's revolutionary brush design. Photo via Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]Lyda Newman's revolutionary brush design. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Hairbrushes today help us keep our locks from looking like knotty messes, and that's largely thanks to Newman's ingenious design. Her brush had evenly-spaced rows of bristles with open slots to guide things like dust and dandruff away from the hair. The hairdresser got a patent for it in 1898, but her work for women didn't stop there.

She also worked with the African-American branch of the Woman Suffrage Party to help women get the vote in New York City. Who says activism and style can't go together?

Women inventors are responsible for so many things on which we've come to rely, yet their work often goes unsung.

It's about time we give them the spotlight they deserve.

To learn more about these and other women inventors, check out this video:

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The inspiring reason this chemist is teaching girls about the science behind makeup.

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Maybelline New York Beauty & Beyond

For most of her life, Balanda Atis has had trouble finding a foundation that matches her skin tone. And she's far from the only woman of color to have this problem.

Growing up in a Haitian community in East Orange, New Jersey, she often heard women in her community voice their frustrations over it. There simply weren't enough specific foundation colors out there for non-white women, so they'd end up using shades that didn't really suit their skin tone.

Even after Atis started working in makeup development at L'Oréal over 18 years ago, this skin tone issue remained prevalent. It actually wasn't until 2011 that their foundation line got the diversity makeover it needed. And that's largely thanks to her.

Atis working in the lab. All photos via Upworthy.

Back in 2006, Atis began the challenging task of fixing the diversity gap in the brand's foundation line.

Their research and development team had just shared a slew of new foundations that were meant to do just that, but when Atis tried them, she told her department head that she still couldn't find her skin tone match. So he turned to her and said, "fix it."

With that, Atis began traveling all over the country collecting data on the wide spectrum of skin tones out there.

Atis and two colleagues ending up doing a lot of their reconnaissance work during their time off on nights and weekends — mostly because it had become a labor of love. As a result, it took several years to collect all the information they needed to start creating more shades. However, in retrospect, the effort was more than worth it.

She wasn't just working to correct an issue at L'Oréal — deepening and expanding foundation shade range has been an industry-wide challenge for decades.

"What drove us on those 12-hour days was knowing that we were solving a problem for women," Atis says.

Atis and a colleague testing foundation pigments.

For example, they learned that adding ultramarine blue, a less widely used color, to certain shades created deep, pure foundation colors that maintained their vibrancy. Previously, darker foundation colors tended to look flat and dull on skin.

When Atis presented their revolutionary findings, L'Oréal put her on the task of developing multi-cultural beauty products full-time as part of a new lab dedicated exclusively to this work. That lead to the creation of more than 30 new foundation shades, which were implemented across L'Oréal in 2011. Needless to say, her involvement was a total game changer.

Several of L'Oréal's brands have since utilized her research including Maybelline, Dermablend, L'Oréal Paris and Lancome.

Moreover, with more women of color becoming the faces of beauty brands, the industry is making it clear that representation matters to them. And thanks to chemistry pioneers like Atis, their image can be accurately enhanced.

That said, Atis and her team are always working to expand the L'Oréal library of shades for women of color. But Atis also has another important focus.  

Today, as head of the Multicultural Beauty Lab at L'Oréal, Atis is showing girls how they too can make a huge difference in the world using science.

Together with her chemistry team, Atis explains to these avid students how they mix and create new foundations, taking into consideration factors like texture and the way light affects different pigments. The hope is that they're inspiring these chemistry enthusiasts to pursue a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math fields).

The benefits of this learning program are two-fold for L'Oréal — they're infusing the STEM world with much-needed diversity and possibly increasing the pool of beauty chemists who see what's lacking in the makeup department.

Atis teaches young women about the chemistry behind making foundations.

"I think it's really important for young girls to learn about STEM, and the opportunities are so big," explains Shauna-Kaye Scotland, senior chemist at L'Oréal. "They need to know that they exist."

The experience seems to do just as much good for the scientists themselves.

"I realized the little bit I was able to share really has a huge impact on them and their future," Atis says.

There's so much possibility that comes with learning the science behind how things are made. As long as women like Atis keep opening the door to interested young women, there's no telling how diverse the spectrum of new women scientists will become.

Learn more about Atis' work with the Multicultural Beauty Lab here:

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