A 23-year-old University of Nevada, Las Vegas student who has interned at NASA and Blue Origin is earning national recognition as one of four women across the country selected for scholarships from the Women in Aerospace Foundation.

Could water pulled from the desert air help Southern Nevada confront its water challenges — and concerns about the growing demand from data centers? That is the goal behind a developing technology from WAVR Technologies, a Las Vegas startup commercializing atmospheric water-harvesting technology developed at UNLV.

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) has been researching an innovative new approach to atmospheric water harvesting with improved water collection rates in arid environments.

Las Vegas-based WAVR Technologies can actually turn air into water. The deep tech startup that spun out of UNLV is commercializing atmospheric water harvesting systems that extract water directly from the air — even in desert environments at humidity levels as low as 10 percent.

Nevada officials are declaring victory over Yucca Mountain — even as some experts cautioned the federal government’s pivot away from the long-stalled and controversial nuclear waste repository may create new problems.

A group of former UNLV students is getting a rare chance to watch their work travel around the moon as part of the Artemis II mission. From 2015 to 2020, the students, led by longtime UNLV professor Dr. Brendan O’Toole, entered a cooperative agreement with Lockheed Martin to work on projects tied to Artemis II. The students have since graduated and now live in different parts of the country, but for the past 10 days, they have been reconnecting as they watch the mission and the spacecraft components they helped develop.

Student engineers from across the valley, the country and the world gathered at UNLV for the FIRST Robotics Competition Las Vegas Regional. The students’ high tech skills and ingenuity were on display at the Thomas and Mack. They have spent months designing, building and programming their robots from scratch.

In recent years, sea life along California’s southern coast has been in a state of crisis, with growing numbers of deceased or sick sea lions washing up on shore. The cause can be traced to toxic algal blooms and domoic acid in particular, which acts as a neurotoxin and can lead to seizures, brain damage, and death. In order to diagnose and treat sick sea lions that are beaching themselves, veterinary professionals are on site to collect blood from the animals. In an effort to improve this procedure and enable vets to work more efficiently, a team of researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) as developed a synthetic sea lion pelvis using a combination of medical imaging and 3D printing technologies.

The arid desert landscape of Death Valley is not the obvious place to find water. Yet it’s here, in one of the planet’s hottest and driest places, that Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers decided to test new technology to pull drinking water from an unconventional source: the air.

The global water system is showing its fragility, and water resilience is fast becoming a defining challenge for economies and investors. UN-Water estimates two-thirds of the world’s population faces shortages for at least a month each year. Analysis by CDP warns that companies could face $225 billion in costs from water-related risks in the short term, while as much as $2.5 trillion in corporate revenue is at risk if water scarcity disrupts supply chains and markets.

Rep. Susie Lee hosted her summit at Springs Preserve on Thursday morning to discuss the most pressing issues regarding Las Vegas’ tiny share of the Colorado River. She was joined by U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; Colby Pellegrino, Southern Nevada Water Authority deputy general manager; the Colorado River Commission of Nevada and UNLV startup WAVR Technologies.

It might sound like science fiction, but for one startup in the valley, atmospheric water harvesting is reality. In the desert valley of Las Vegas, where water is as precious as gold, a team of researchers at WAVR is working to turn the air we breathe into the water we drink.