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TECH NEWS
Is this edible water blob the future of cycling water bottles?
London-based Skipping Rocks Lab has developed Ooho!, an edible water blob that looks like something you might expect to see on the International Space Station. The idea of the product is to reduce reliance on plastic water bottles, and could maybe, one day in the far future, have implications for cycling.
The blobs are more technically balls of water encased in an algae-based gel. This allows the squishy water balls to be handled. To ingest the water it’s simply a matter of biting them and sucking out the liquid, a bit like an energy gel, but rather less sticky.
It’s probably a bit of stretch of the imagination to see these replacing the humble bidon just yet, but who knows, maybe in the future we might be hydrating on the move by using edible water bottles? At the moment the unique double membrane containing the water, a brown algae extract used to create a gel outer layer, is as thick as fruit skin, so far too fragile for cycling use.
So challenges remain for the designers behind Ooho! but watch this space we reckon. Ooho! is licensed as creative commons so everyone could make them at their kitchen, so there's nothing to stop you creating your own.
Ooho! has been nominated in the INDEX: Award Design to Improve Life 2015 competition, with €100,000 presented to the winner in each category; Body, Home, Work, Play & Learning and Community.
David worked on the road.cc tech team from 2012-2020. Previously he was editor of Bikemagic.com and before that staff writer at RCUK. He's a seasoned cyclist of all disciplines, from road to mountain biking, touring to cyclo-cross, he only wishes he had time to ride them all. He's mildly competitive, though he'll never admit it, and is a frequent road racer but is too lazy to do really well. He currently resides in the Cotswolds, and you can now find him over on his own YouTube channel David Arthur - Just Ride Bikes.
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16 comments
Actually it could work.
A belt of small sized of those water balls and each time you just have take one off put in your moth to hydrate and spit out the algae.
After you done with all the water you are left with nothing. No water batter weight or cage weight.
I love the way the girl at the begining just takes it out of her bag, like you'd just chuck this fragile blob full of water into your bag like you might with a bottle of water.
There are obvoius issues with hygine and storage of these things. You'd need a pot or tub of some sort to store/carry them which sort of defeats the object.
I can see applications for liquid sweets or something equally horrible though.
Great for water bombs...environmentally friendly too...no rubber balloons to clear up after a water fight...
Posted a week early surely?
not a real world application but in the tiny world that is cycling any possibility could be used to replace the outers on gels?
i hate looking at litter when out on my bike and would like to think that cyclist generated litter shouldn't be a problem
They'd be more useful when thrown at passing motorists, dogs, seagulls and finally...anyone with a camera on their head.
Maybe they might be useful in a survival kit to help ration water?
i'll stick to using a bottle thanks
Let me speak to my local night worker, and see what sucking on my testicle feels like
Even if developed into a working product for cycling NO! Sounds gross to me
Make the blobs much smaller, and stick a few hundred together, and you've got something like a pomegranate. Make the outer shell of algae much thicker, and you can protect it. Hang on, have we just reverse engineered fruit - nature's own bidon?
But they look like breast implants...
Brain implant to improve the intellectual capacity of RLJs?
I'm guessing you'd need about 10-15 of these to replace the quantity held in a water bottle. So where are all these sacks of water going to go? Some sort of plastic cage
You would have to drink all of it at once wouldn't you?
And judging by the video, use both hands to do so. And be left with a nice algae gel pouch afterwards.