Recently, a 14-year-old junior high school student Jia Mingxuan from Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, China, won the gold award at an International Exhibition of Inventions Nuremberg, Germany, with his invention of an automatic watering device for trees in arid areas.

Inspired by the phenomenon of water droplets forming on the lid of a pot and then sliding down when it's being heated for cooking, along with the condensation principle in physics, Jia came up with the idea of using the water vapor in the air to automatically water the trees.

The temperature difference between day and night in the Chifeng area is quite large during summer. The average temperature during the day is approximately 27℃, while the average temperature at night is about 14℃.

This device utilizes the temperature difference between the ground surface and underground soil, to allow air to circulate inside hollow steel pipes buried vertically in the soil. Fans are installed at the top of the pipes to direct the outside air to the bottom of the pipes. This enables the water vapor in the air to condense into small water droplets underground, which then penetrate the tree roots to provide water for the trees, achieving automatic watering and reducing the cost of afforestation.