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Batteries Powered by Leftover Food
Lazyhound writes "Technologists at the University of the West of England in Bristol have come up with a cheap, organic battery that can run on household leftovers, and be manufactured for just £10." There's also a New Scientist article. The New Scientist would like to point out that they broke the story, and the BBC followed up.
quote, for easy kharma.
A. Rightmann
a battery that uses E.Coli to break down food.
Smart people, smart. I assume that either the case is indesctructable or that the strain of bacteria is modded to be harmless?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If your leftovers consist of sugar cubes and carrots. I mean, come on!
I bet you could power a HUGE beowulf cluster (sorry had to) if only you could harness the gas from everyone eating taco bell. Now theres something to do if you have leftovers. Sort of a gas/electric hybrid, watch for Honda's next innovation. Should be interesting!
On a leftover Twinkie, you could get power forever!
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Nice invention, but nowadays batteries are used mostly in cell-phones, PDA's, etc. With the trend of miniaturising these, I can already see the mess, trying to pry sticky leftovers in my cell-phone :(
Scientists say 50 grammes of sugar would keep a 40-watt light bulb lit for eight hours.
Now snif, snif, I can finally take that road trip with only a laptop and 200 liters of soda that I always dreamed of!!
if only they make a satellite dish that works on pickled weiners...
i think i already know the awnser, but the article says "Chemical reactions inside the cell strip electrons from the hydrogen atoms to produce a voltage that can power a circuit.
Scientists say 50 grammes of sugar would keep a 40-watt light bulb lit for eight hours.
so does the e.coli eat it's excrement (hydrogen) and produce electricity? i'm guessing it's the cell in the battery that does this...
secondly - let's sterilize the hell out of our current landfills, and introduce this bacteria to them! same thing goes for our mouths - no more cavities!
moox. for a new generation.
Moms Can't yell at Kids anymore for not eating their dinner. I can see it now.
Boy: "Mom I don't want to eat my dinner!"
Mom: "Fine son well at least refresh the batteries in my Vibrator"
Boy: Sure Mom!!!
Sort of a gas/electric hybrid, watch for Honda's next innovation. Should be interesting!
Honest dear - if I stop farting in the car, we'll never make it there by 8pm!
Guess this gives a whole new dimension to the words "power hungry equipment"...
Come on everyone. Get all of your Back To The Future jokes out now. It's not that often that a reference like this comes along.
Question: Can the batteries be charged with Old Cellphones?
Or this one? F33R!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So when my house burps will it say excuse me? In the future when our lamps are shining to bright will our house doctor come for a vist and tell the house "take 2 of theese and call me in the morning"?
So now I can finally clean that 6 month old rotting chinese food out of my fridge and put it to good use!
This post will be modded down for no particular reason by a sweaty 14 year old who is not allowed out past dark.
I guess the most important issue is whether or not this device will generate the necessary 1.21 gigawatts of electricity? :)
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
Now I have something else to do with those leftover cabbage rolls, I threw out on the way to work.
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
What I took from the article is that their goal is to get it to work with regular food instead of refined sugar cubes, which they call refined fuel. Their next step is to work with carrots.
Oh sure, you can use table scraps to power the flux capacitor, but the engine still runs on gasoline.
refines as in not having OTHER stuff added to it.
say, throwing it that week-old cake, + a bunch of other chemicals.
that would just take the fun outta it.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Finally i have use for all pizza slices all over my desk. Must be a godsend for geeks.
HTTP/1.1 400
So what happens if you eat everything and have no leftovers? Is this gonna lead to people deliberately wasting food so they can break it down for power?
No, they don't want more refinement, they want less. As in you stick the raw sugar beets or sugar cane inside.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I remember wiring potatoes into a clock I had as a kid, so this really is nothing new. The ability to harnass food is grand and all, but the food gets pretty smelly after a few days.
--trb
1 W = 1 J/s. 1 kcal = 1 Cal = 4000 J. Therefore, if I want 3 kW of power continuously (which is about how much an average US home uses), I would need to feed my HomeStomach(TM) Generator less than 3/4 Calorie/second. My suggestion is to stock up on Tic-Tacs.
So that's why they call those big tailpipes on the backs of sticker-laden Hondas "fart pipes"!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
more like: what's this little tube sticking out of the seat? Just stick it up your arse, and here, have another bean burrito... long trip to california.
mechanicos ergo cogito
I guess what I was trying to get at was that I would probably pay for a model that ran on refined sugar right now. I don't care about waiting for other foods, refined sugar is good enough for me if it can run my laptop.
Inside the battery, which is the size of a personal CD player, a colony of E.coli bacteria produce enzymes which break down carbohydrates and release hydrogen.
I dont know how comfortable I would be with on eof these in my home...
Now you just need to invent ferrous pizza.
The main aspect of this energy source is that it completely suppress the need for combustion. Instead it uses slow, catalyzed, controlled chemical processes that use a lower amount of initial energy.
It also suppresses the need for fuel tanks at all. Lost in the wild ? Collect some grass / plants + your picnic leftovers, and toss into the engine. Away from gas stations ? Empty your kitchen's trash into it. If it's possible to buile a small powerplant like these easily as the article claims, I'll be among the first to do so, and will install it in my house so I'm no longer dependent on the Electricity company.
All that's left is the need to go to the grocery store more often. Or you can start farming. Apart from that: complete independance (well, except for the fact that I'd still need an ISP).
leftover turkey sandwhiches for a week or two is the best part ;)
So could something like a sheeps eye see you through the week? :-)
Presumably different waste food will be more suitable for generating power. This could be very useful if it somehow could join with your existing home power supply. That or it could power your waste disposal unit. If not then it could have some uses for things like camping. This could definitely prove useful in the future. It's a very good idea.
woo hooo we can now get rid of the internal combustion engine!
"I wouldn't like the idea of Mr. Fusion digesting all the leftovers of Sunday lunch from a large family!
Or your typical sysadmin/slashdotter.
That gives me an idea - what a great way to deal with dead people. Why put them in a graveyard or cremate them when you could make them into a battery!
"whoa! granny is powering my webserver!!"
Maybe it only needs to generate those gigawatts for a very short time. After all, energy = power x time.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Ok, so they can turn food into power, now all I need is a delorian that goes back in time and I'll have a perfect life!
~ now you know
Hasn't one of the big problems with fuel cell tech for cars, getting the hydrogen while you are "on the road". Think of it. Every septic tank in America could be a fuel depot!! Convert your "outflow" to "cash flow"...
It sure would bring a whole new meaning to the words "dead battery".
And to juice a brick! too.
Scientists say 50 grammes of sugar would keep a 40-watt light bulb lit for eight hours.
Two questions:
This being said, this is truly interesting!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Some of that leftover food stuck between their blackish-yellow rotting teeth would really supply some fuel. Whay do Brits have rotting teeth? Even wealthy parasites like the royal family have disgusting filthy teeth. Is that old hag the queen mum still alive?? I always hated that parasite.
try your digestive tract
Let me know when it can produce 1.21 gigawatts!
I wonder if the smells of the rotten food can be contained within the case of this "organic battery". If not, it will hardly be usable within an apartment, nor will a portable version (like many previous posters considered) be possible to sell.
VKh
Hmm. I like the idea.
I have no idea how this could work, but imagine uh nanobots or something that ran around your body using your fat for energy, and doing something useful, like uh strectching the muscles and whatever else nanobots do.
I went to the Univeristy Of WOE (as we called it), there was a pizza shop inside the bar, with the mess that is left on the floor at the end of each night drinking i suggest they could power the entire univeristy for a whole day (including the 24 hours MUD rooms, sorry i mean computer rooms.
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
Many foods have the energy content on the label - so many kilojoules per portion. Of course only the dieting industry would really care about that for choosing what to eat. But now, you can calculate how much battery life that corresponds to!
According to the article, a sugar cube packs about a megajoule of energy: given the current price of sugar, how does that compare with other energy sources? It seems reasonably competitive against mains electricity, though dearer than oil or gas.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Team leader Chris Melhuish told New Scientist magazine said that although the new MCFs run on sugar cubes, the team aims to move on to carrot power.
Great... no matter what color car I buy, it will eventually turn orange.
Scientists say 50 grammes of sugar would keep a 40-watt light bulb lit for eight hours.
.32 Killowatt Hours.
.06 here. So we're talking about 2 penny's worth of energy.
.02 cents.
Let's do the math. 50 grames = 12 1/2 servings. Or, 12.5 * 15 = 187.5 C (That's big C calories or really kilo-calories).
40 watts * 8 hours =
A KW Hours costs about
A round cylindrical sugar container of the coffee area variety has 567g's so were talking about 1/10 of a thing of sugar which costs about $.50.
So, the sugar costs 10 cents but the same energy produced by a power plant costs
So, when the greens step up the argument of, big business is squashing new alternative energy sources, maybe there's sound economic reasoning on the part of the neysayers.
The potato clock is just a battery, not a fuel cell. You stick two dissimilar metals into any electrolyte (such as the juice in a potato) and you get current. Heck, with one of those kits, you could stick the electrodes into your mouth and generate current.
On a related note, because the amalgam fillings in your mouth contain two dissimilar metals (silver and mercury), and saliva is an electrolyte, you could conceivably power your cell phone with your fillings. I am NOT making this up, there are documented medical cases where galvanic reactions involving amalgam fillings have been observed, e.g.: "Dr. William Cheshire, a physician at the Mayo Clinic, reports on a case where a woman's trigeminal neuralgia (tic douloureux) was traced to a galvanic reaction between an amalgam filling and an adjacent gold-alloy crown. Consumption of tomatoes and other acidic foods produced intense jolts described as being like those of an 'electrical battery'." (The abstract is here.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
Ok, so hydrogen - electron = proton right? Well what do they do with all of the protons? Protons are where all of the mass is, and it seems unlikely that you can just keep feeding food into a cell without having to... well, um... take it for a walk.... right?
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
Yes, Mr. Fusion was the first thing that popped into my mind, followed by the robot powered by slugs, followed by the Matrix. The microbes are not going to care whether the leftovers are pizza, or people, right?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I now finally have SOMETHING to do with my moms MEAT LOAF
--JonnyBlog
Today we salute you Mr.regardless-of-topic-lets-post-beowulf-cluster-
Without paying any attention to the story at hand you stay true to your mission of spreading the gospel of the Grendel slayer.
Grendel slayer
Be it virus spreading lego men, Jon Katz fanclub winamp skins, or coffee grinders running Red Hat...
running Red Hat
...you can imagine them all in multiplicitous clusters.
clusters baby
So next time you're browsing slashdot ignore all the posts blasting Python, Perl or patent lawyers just set the threshold to -1 and do a search for the hero of the Geats, then think for a minute Geats and Gates? Is Beowulf a prophecy?
Gosh, why is slashdot always so Eurocentric? Anybody mind converting those pounds into dollars?
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
I hate to point out the obvious, but how will you remove the digested food from the battery?
(Of course, this is not a problem for backyard generator type of systems, but might be for your laptop)
The benefits of this are enourmous in a place like Papua New Guinea where subsitance farmers don't really have a true cash economy and as such don't have any way to adequately pay for kerosene or "zoom" - motorboat fuel as I like to call it. Solar is to expensive, but fruits and vegitables are really cheap and plentiful.
I think sugar has about 5 Cal/g so that's 250 Cal = 1,000,000 J. Keeping in mind that "4000 J/C" is an approximation, their numbers are right.
Great, now akll we need to do is make a flash light, fill it with sugar and it's ready to go.
With fall arriving here in the North East of the United States, I'll soon have a back yard full of leaves. Would this technology work for this type of organic material as well, or should I go ahead and shred them up with the lawn mower and use them as mulch & compost?
--- have you healed your church website?
Think of all the furnaces and landfills this could replace. I always thought the gas burners over a landfill were wasted energy.
Dump the waste into a industrial version (ok, might take a few years to develop), and hook it up to the power grid. Even if it doesn't provide a whole lot of energy, it's more energy we have to play with that doesn't come from fossil fuels.
Of course, there's still the problem of what to do with the leftover waste. And someone's going to have to sort the organic stuff from the plastics (I had some bad jobs in college, but...)
Good idea tho. Turns useless waste into useful energy. I'd buy that for a dollar.
Warning: May contain nuts
-Quote- I've been running my fridge that way for years now! -/Quote-
That is exactly how I run my car too... Half eaten sandwhich over here, some chips on the seat, open soda cans between the seats, etc.
I still cant figure out why I can't have a second date with a chick tho. Go figure?
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
If I remember correctly from Biology, these bacteria will take several hours to get some gasses going from digesting and then you get to wait for such power. Could be good for having a vat of food waste in a drum outside the back of a country cabin maybe, then you'd have to have it heated, too? At what temperature will E-Coli die in a pile of rotting food? Then, you'd have to "dump" the waste at some point, but then what comtaminants is the user exposed to?
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
"Are you done done with your sandwhich because my laptop's battery is running low?"
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
I think what you're missing here is the notion of efficiency. Ostensibly, the ElectroStomach is producing usable energy from what would otherwise be trash. So the cost isn't a factor, since you'd already purchased the fuel to begin with, and were only going to throw it away.
If you imagine how much food goes down garbage disposals or gets dumped into landfills, there's conceivably millions of kilowatt-hours worth of power being lost. Reclaiming that power would be revolutionary.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
That's Jiggawatts.
Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.
Never fear. It also sounds just as inefficient and impractical as all solialistis solutions. ;-)
One this baby gets up to 88mph, you're going to see some serious shit.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Nothing, just the battery on my new laptop. I found something green and furry in the back of the fridge, and decided to see how long it would support a Quake3 fragfest.
(and you thought lan parties smelled bad after 3 days with no showers...)
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Unfortunately, the people who sell the oil aren't going to be quite so happy about this. I'm sure they'll do everything in their power to prevent the rollout of devices like these.
I haven't heard much about these "solialistis solutions", can you expound on that?
They would probably sell granules like the ones they sell for septic tanks, to "refresh" your battery.
Will the British government bust people who use these batteries for evading the UK's fuel tax? They are busting the drivers of "grease cars." The oil mafia will crush alternative fuels at every turn, and they have governments in their back pockets.
How ya like dat?
Sure beats sending the food to a starving third-world country as my parents always threatened to do.
Their numbers contain a little of the stench usually associated with products containing Ecoli---
:: .04kw*8hours=0.32kWh=1152kiloJoules
:: 187.5Calories = 785 kiloJoules
-lets do a little math...
The article claims 8 hours @ 40 watts from 50 grams of sugar: 40watts=.04kW
according to the domino box in my hand, 4grams sugar=15 Calories, so the sugar contains 12.5*15=187.5 Calories
So-- they claim to be getting 1152kJ output for a 785kJ input???? 146% output is impressive, but not likely.
If you have leftover it simply means you cooked too much!
Sure this is a good idea, but it only uses the energy in the food - i.e. all the time you use to cook it, decoration etc. are still completely wasted efforts. I'm sure the battery would still work if you put the "raw materials" in it i.e. eggs, meat, vegetables, sugar, grain etc.
Cooking it then feeding it to a battery instead of eating it just makes no sense to me. Unless they make a battery with a sense of taste.
They gave a rough figure of 50g of sugar powering a 40W light bulb for eight hours.
40W x 8hrs = 0.32 kWh
50g * 2.204623 = 0.110 lbs
Cheap bags of sugar at netgrocer are $0.66/lb.
0.11 lbs * $0.66 = $0.073
1/0.32 = 3.125
$0.073*3.125 = $0.23
So by my rough calculations, if you bought bags of sugar to feed the fuel cell for house power, you'd be paying $0.23/kWh, which is significantly higher than I pay for electricity here in Texas.
Their currently technology only uses pure sugar. They're working towards carrots they claim - but I would imagine the efficiency can only decrease from the raw sugar efficiency per dollar unless the fundamentals of their technology improve.
11*43+456^2
---a long time ago now I built a very simple but quite functional methane digester. I used just a scrap oil drum and a washtub and some cheap hoses. The starter fuel to produce the methane was a combo of farm animal waste and some weeds and rotten apples I had-just whatever biomass I had handy. Lived on a ranch then, had a lot of "stuff" to experiment with. Anyway, it worked so well and made so much gas I am still amazed this technology isn't in more widespread useage now. Well, I am not amazed actually from watching the shenanigans of the power monopolies. The gas could be burned directly as a replacement for natural gas or propane, or perhaps now used in conjunction with a fuel cell. There are x-hundreds of thousands of small digesters in use around the world now, primarily for cooking and lighting, and a few hundred large operations in the US, at municipal waste treatment plants and a few on some large farms, but really, there's a technology that needs more adoption. The coolness factor is it can be scaled from very small to whatever size you want into the commercial sized levels. It is beyond easy to set one up near as I can tell compared to a lot of other alternative tech out there. Granted, not directly in your laptop, but there is no reason that it couldn't be adapted to a normal building sized unit that went to making electricity with the gas and use it that way. The various waste/biomatter stuff gets made, no reason to not use it. I honestly don't know the name of the bacteria involved though. It's anerobic digestion-decomposition in the absence of oxygen, as opposed to aerobic decomposition, ie, a "compost pile", or like I think is used in the tech in the article.
Fueling this thing with sugar is one thing, but fueling it with food scraps is an entirely seperate problem.
What happens when the devices becomes full of un-usuable material? When it is full, and you clean it out - can you buy a little replentishing vial of new E.coli? Will you have to replace the redox chemicals?
How long would it take to get one of these going? That is, if you wanted to use it immediately, would you have to jump start it with sugar and drop some other food in so that the decomposition process could begin? As anyone with a compost bin knows, decomposition is pretty slow process and may only yeild sufficient quantities of enzymes after an initial growing period.
Here's one guy hoping these guys can overcome the obstacles.
refined sugar + water = a pretty cheap power supply to me, even if i do have to carry the water around. airlines will give you all the water you want, which, coincidentally, is probably where this battery would be most successful to start off with.
moox. for a new generation.
Does anyone else think that sitting in the middle of a forest, in a tent, but with an 8-hour 40w bulb, kind of defeats the point of going on a camping trip in the first place?
This device, as useful as it sounds, will probably never make it to the mainstream, thanks to Duracell and Energizer... why have a renewable power source when for the same price you could carry around heavey chunks of metal that are illegal to through in the trash!
That just sounds like crazy talk to me...
-VolVE
--honestly, not flaming you-but please, take a holiday and spend a month out in the countryside and do some farm work. You really need to get some basic education to where food comes from and how we as humans are tied to the earth. Animal manure is spread on fields. there's your answer. You can touch it and not die. Really. Humans have been exposed to this "contaminant" for millenia. You'll appreciate the education you get, really. This is a small rant, but this is the reason there's such a schism between the urban elitist and centric laws that get passed and how they are contantly dumping on the rural people we have every year, especially in the US. I constantly get reminded of this with events like this post. Tech education is one thing,learning to use the subway and the stereo and the ability to open packages of food from the grocery store is Ok as far as it goes, but real world outside where the sun shines and the plants grow and the animals live education shouldn't be neglected, at least some basic 101 "how things work" education. all people need this, everyone, I don't care how rich they are or what their jobs are, IMO everyone needs to know and have an appreciation for real-world "nature" besides a drive in the park and watching discovery channel. this needs be hands-on doing it. Really, take a month and go work on a farm someplace, it'll be worth a degree to you in practical balanced knowledge. You won't get a piece of paper with a "certification" on it, but the education will be just as real.
When I first saw this, it reminded me of the mechanism (it was called "Mr." something) that Doc Brown was using to power his super-delorean in Back To The Future... :P
But what I'm wondering how consistent the voltage it provides is like.. I say this because my MP3 player loves to die on me before the batteries actually do because of its voltage needs that alkalines can't consistently provide.
"Hey, Mike, got a recharge for my MP3 player?"
"I think there's an old brownie in my pocket..."
Well that means my ex-wife will never have to worry about having a dead battery in her car ever again. She's got enough MacDonalds french fries stuck in the seat crack to crank the engine for *days*. And still have enough Joules left over to light Las Vegas on Christmas Eve.
stale, flat beer?
through == throw /. is going to kill my spelling... bah!
-VolVE
Well, the advantage might be that currently most people don't compost, as they have no reason too. Food scraps make up a decent amount of landfill waste, but it's all mixed in and can't be separated out.
However, if people had a incentive for composting, they would put all of their waste into the battery located in the back of their house, say. While not all of the scraps would be gone, it would probably decay much more quickly than it would in a landfill, and it would generate some electricity.
Waste management crews could pick up the waste once it had been decomposed, filter it, sanitize it, and sell it as a fertilizer or soil filler.
The improvement is that chemical batteries actually add to our trash volume and these might reduce it.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
You're confusing physics "heat energy" calories with "nutitrition" calories -- the two unfortunately use the same name but are measuring different things.
Here is a link to a calculation someone did concerning the energy density requred for a "laser pistol" and comparing it to a can of Potato Cheese soup. It's about the same.
Never underestimate the Power of Cheese!
NURSE: I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do.
OWNER: But my laptop was just fine a few minutes ago? What happened?
NURSE: Your organic batteries have food poisoning.
OWNER: Oh my lord... what can I do!?!?
NURSE: Nothing... he's dead now Jim.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these!!!!
no I'm not... those are "nutritional" calories....aka kilo-calories
.785kJoule
if it were thermal calories, 187.5 would be equivalent to
It's the first to mention Mr Fusion. The timestamp is there for a reason, numbnuts.
why not capitalize on bad situations, turning them into something useful? Next time you or your buddies gets sloppy drunk, then try to have a "Designated Energizer" to collect the liquid feces and vomitous that will soon explode from your body and make use of the high acidity of said liquids contrasted with the actual alcohol left over (if there is any) to form cheap batteries. While your friends won't fell any better physically, they will know that their foolishness served not just as an embarrassment for the entire human race but also served to reduce the environmental impact of energy use. Plus, why not recoup a little money from the costs of cleaning your carpet, upholstery, seat covers and clothes? Our bodies have produced this bounty, so why not harvest it and enjoy the benefits?
I'm not so sure about that - when we learn
that Mr Fusion is connected to the DeLorian,
it's also revealed that the car can fly. Is
the flight gas powered or garbage powered -
that's not revealed.
ENERGY bars and ENERGY drinks have been around for a while!!! Someone gimme a Red Bull and I can run a bike generator for a few days :)
So basically we have a battery that produces energy by eating and digesting. What strikes me as funny, is that fact that all of the news reports leave out the mention of what comes next for all things that eat and digest...waste disposal. So I'm now going to have to carry a pooper-scooper and little plastic baggies for all of my battery powered items!?
Sounds like these batteries will need to poop sometime or another. Maybe you could hook a large one, enough to power your house, up to the sewer.
Wait. Stick with me here. Maybe you could do it backwards, and have these batteries eat poop, and produce leftovers for the waste. Then they could power the fridge to store it and the microwaves to reheat it.
Just like that South Park episode...
Looks like you got yourself a renewable resource there...pretty lean machine...so to speak
harness the gas from everyone eating taco bell.
So, theorectically, a Slashdot Meetup could be used to combat rolling blackouts.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
gives an entire new meaning too
Maybe if you play long enough you make enough peniciline to heal the next stack of "dead" batteries...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
which looks as if it's about to gian it's own intelligence and escape!
catgirls and fairies
Someone should introduce this technology to Cuba. Castro would be transformed over night from third-world despot to first-world sugar sheik.
Well, maybe not , but he could probably afford to bring back streetlights or domething.
- The reason you would connect batteries in series is to increase voltage. Two AA batteries (1.5V each) in series gives a total voltage of 3V. Most residential light bulbs (in the US - not sure about UK) run on 120V; it would take a lot of AAs to get this, but the organic cells probably do better than 1.5V - my guess is 3-5V.
- The article says that each cell could be produced for around 10 GBP (about $16), so I'm guessing not very much.
-- HamsterActually, the flux capacitor is a real thing. The term was borrowed for the movie cause it sounded cool. Obviously the real one isn't related to time travel ;).
It was the point of many jokes for the quarter of my electronics class when we dealt with capacitors and inductors.
WE all know there is a oil shortage expected to occur in 20 or 30 years. If this idea takes off, can we expect a food shortage instead? Thinking that people just grow food so it can decompose for batterys.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Food to fuel isn't a new idea. The human body already manages that conversion just fine.
Calories are measurements of the amount of heat energy. Guess that means the higher-calorie foods will be more useful for charging this battery.
Refuel at McDonald's.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
"It has to be able to use raw materials, rather than giving it refined fuel."
I think you missed the point. At present, they probably do add water to the sugar. But they are aiming to process household wastes (carrot peels, sewage) rather than refined sugar (a pure carbohydrate like, er, petrol/gasoline).
The drawing that they used for the capacator was for the time travel one, not the real world one. Guess I should have been more specific.
Xaotik Designs
Academia is everywhere today and it has replaced the majority of common sense and "hands on" knowledge that is both the backbone and brain of modern society and it's success.
Am I the only person here having visions of Christopher Lloyd stuffing garbage into the back of a Delorean?
I agree fully that it would be foolish to use less efficient production methods simply because it is local. However, it seems your measure of efficiency is not including total cost of ownership and operation. If a household spends 50 USD for a device that requires only 10 dollars (per year) maintenance but yet through its production of electricity saves the household 200 dollars (a year) then that is a good investment. You mentioned automobiles and that is a good analogy. While I myself commute to work on mass transit I understand the definite drawbacks (mainly lack of freedom, potential to be really late to work or from work to home because of a limited transit schedule, no guarantee of sitting room, etc) However other factors have made me decide that it is indeed beneficial to keep using mass transit.
If people set up a cheap system that actually turns "trash into treasure" then how can that be bad? That is not to say that cities should not use a similiar technology (if it works) that not only increases the amount of fuels but kills two birds with one stone in the case of trash, biological waste, etc. Yeah, I think many have heard of small operations that utilize anything from the heat from composting (killing two birds once again) to capturing the methane from pig and cattle farms. This seems to be different in that it is smaller scale, the very thing you claim is bad. While it would be 'nice' if a transparent system (to the end user) was set up on any more efficient, cleaner, cheaper method... the ability to gain benefit from what was once just thrown away will be the very thing that will drive such technology... its just human nature.
Now, my question is how long will it be till I can squat over my car intake after eating a viscious burrito in order to have a "free" trip to the pub?
Oh, one other thing... you bring up a good question, "What are the benefits to localizing the energy generation?" and I am reminded of how short sighted people say things like (in regards to computing) "640k ought to be enough for anybody", "client server topology will replace any peering or thin client system in the future", etc. The thing is just that you don't know what the future will bring, but what you should observe from history is that hardcoding systems often causes more problems than are solved. I can see situations where it would be foolish to centralize production and those where it would be the best thing to do. As for cleaning, I guess that would be a question aimed at experts in septic and reclaimation systems.
They'd probably sell you a liquifying tool. Probably a cheap miniature blender.
They could give them away as sort of a promotion... "Buy this battery pack and we'll throw in a Fuelizer(tm) for free!"
What's this Submit thingy do?
The nice part about this battery is, 'What happens if it runs out?'.
Simple. I have no idea about plants, but I imagine woodland creatures are bound to have some degree of the appropriate susbtances in them.
Gives a whole new meaning to the concept of an 'Energizer Bunny'.
Isaac Asimov's Moonbase is a story about nanomachines, their uses, and the violent public backlash. (Those people were called "nanoluddites")
What's this Submit thingy do?
*laugh* too true. I'll bring it up at the next meetup here.
;)
And I just *love* your sig. Easily in my top 3 favorite Slashdot sigs.
siri
I've been making hydrogen and sulfur for years now....especially on tuesday morning after Monday Night Football, beer and nachos.
They should just make a device you fart into...that would be much more efficient.
-ted
Once I finish installing this in my home, I actually *want* all my relatives to send me fruitcakes for the various holidays!
how much energy I could get out of the poop my cat makes each day instead of using leftover food?
however the byproduct of this is very likely to be a brownout :)
Actually the US power grid (and, really, the majority of power grids) are highly ineffecient. (Don't have a link, but you can find several articles to this end on MIT Tech. Report and Wired in the last year.)
;-)
Combine this with the net energy loss of hauling your fuel in from several hundred million points (houses, offices, apartments, resturaunts, etc.) and you only increase the waste (especially since you'd probably have two sets of garbage trucks roaming around) and the energy lost due to the fact that food will be partially (mostly?!) broken down by the time it gets there (unless they start carting off your food wastes in refrigerated trucks) and you see the issues with your plan...
Actually, if you read up a bit, you'll find that, while a little nervous about the economic impacts on current power generators, power grid owners tend to be quite optimistic about distributed power production.
Also, have you ever sat down and figured out the amound of energy lost when you try to shove a huge current down a tiny wire (and even the big/fat powerlines are "tiny" when you look at it this way.) I forget, but there is something like an average of 20% loss of power between a big gerenator and the substation in your neighbor hood. Stand under a high voltage line: where do you think the energy for all that buzzing and crackling is coming from? Stand closer and ask yourself where all that heat is coming from. But not too close...
Umm. Wouldn't juicing take out most of the sugar? After all, when he said carrots, I immediatley assumed the purpose of using carrots was because of their high sugar content.
Voltage is not as important as power - there are quite efficient voltage converters, you can avoid stacking batteries using one of those (at a cost of some power loss). The thing that matters is power - you cannot 'convert' power. We still don't know how much power can such a battery yield.
That is only a partial answer - the article does not state whether the chemicals get used up. If they are only catalysts, then hooray - you buy them once and only refill sugar. If not - back to the original question.
do I take it to a GP, GI, ENT,proctologist, or Radio Shack? Can it burp or fart?
Too optimistic - we don't even know if a battery produces more energy than it is needed for its manufacturing, let alone smelting a thousand tons of steel without turning a continent into a carrot monoculture.
Wow, personally had i the karma to burn i would mod you to -1 Flamebait/Troll you.... cause *Newsflash* We _already_ did that, and tried to do that in Cuba as well at the behest of the Hershey Corp (as well as others). Please try to add a bit of history to your obviously small repetior(sic).
Easy -- make the dough out of grains genetically engineered to absorb iron from the soil.
My deviantArt site
The carrot needs to have enough sugar (sweet carrot) and you will also need to have light cargo and a hungry donkey.
Fh
"Damn, this bread is a bit moldy."
:)
"Well, just feed it to the TV, dear."
You _do_ know how they found penecillin, right?
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
...is not cheaper than buying the power from the local power company. Not that anybody would think it would be, but I did some calculations just to see how much more expensive it actually would be.
I used their 40W light bulb for 8 hours on 50g sugar ratio, and I used google to determine the going rate for a Kilowatt-hour and a 5 lb. bag of sugar. I determined (all rough estimates, mind you) that running a 40W light bulb for 3 days would use 1 lb. of sugar and cost $.52(USD), where running the same light bulb for the same amount of time with grid power would cost only $.19(USD). The article says that the researchers are trying to make it more efficient, so maybe someday we'll all be off the grid thanks to E. coli. Weird.
-- My hovercraft is full of eels.
I love that the picture in the article is a plate of leftover food... like we don't know what leftover food looks like.
:)
Then again, considering how much we Americans eat, maybe we don't know what it looks like, and the pic's just a favor done for us Yanks across the pond
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
the circle is closed.
Have those idiots never watched tv? This is not cause for excitment.. !
I think there's a tropical flower that does something like that. It has a huge blossom that smells like rotting meat. I can't remember if it eats the flies or is pollenated by them, though... I think it may just get pollenated by them.
And do we all have to dress like Doc from the 2nd episode?
What do you do?
:)
Liposuction!
What is that?
Fat reduction!
KITH rules. rule. whatever.
--- this comment is presented in WIDE SCREEN STEREO!!!
P=workdone/time
5 calories/gram of sugar (being nice here)
1 calorie=4.184 joules (not kilo joules. If you yankees worked in metric like everyone else in the world we wouldn't have this problem)
therefore 50g of sugar has 5*50*4.184=1046 joules
once again joules not kilo joules.
P=workdone/time
therefore assumming 100% efficiency (good luck) the maximum power obtainable over eight hours is
1046 joules/(8*60*60 seconds)
=36mWatts. Oh my god this is great we can run a 36mWatt light bulb for 8 hours with 50g of sugar.
We have a few leftover cookies, brought to the office because they were stale, and hungry employees being paid less than a dollar over the mininum wage have been eating them when they get hungry. You can have them, however, but I would imagine that the tiny, tiny lightbulb powered by such an arrangement would hardly suffice to provide enough light to allow our employees to look over the "want-ad's", having realized that the "monopoly money" that we get paid won't pay any real-world bills.
So how many BTU's of body heat do these microbes generate?
So now do we call them E."Coppertop" Coli?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Now I finally have a use for all that old pizza stacked up in the corner of my room......
Dont forget about the backwash left in the Mountain Dew cans as well.
Actually, it is Gigawatts. Giga is supposed to be pronounced with a soft "G", making it sound like a J... Someone, somewhere, many years ago said giga with a hard g and it stuck.
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
First you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women...
Anything to reduce the dependency on oil, I guess...
If you like it in bulk, you can have 112,000 lbs of sugar for US$ 8,176, or about 7.3 cents/lb, if you don't mind picking it up in New York. (Bring friends.) But that's only if you are going to export it. If you live in the U.S., you have to pay $24,371 (21.8 c/lb) because we have to protect our domestic sugar beet industry from the insidious international sugar conspiracy that threatens the very pillars of our civilization. Or, because the farmers lobby has too much pull in Washington. I forget which one it is.
--
Why are all american articles giving prices in US$, whu can't they give it in S$ so I don't have to convert everything#)(/)
I thought the days of McCarty (the communist hunter, if I recollect correct) were over.
Heh. This is how that'll go down...
A Light Snack (C)Stephen Notley
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Nobody said anything about calories. We are talking about Calories.
i wonder what the bastard will smell like.. if it isn't pleasant, might take a while to gain acceptance.
then again, if it smells like garbage, maybe it could attract flies, and maybe the flies could feed it.. ah, that would be funny.
Many people already use home composters and vermiculture (earthworms) as means of disposing of (non-meat) food waste. If taken care of properly, they do not smell and do not attract flies. I do both, and there is no smell and there is little work involved.
I suspect that the jonk-powered battery will similarly work without odor. In fact, I suspect that would be a design requirement.
guac-foo.
Lots of petrified grits
many years ago said giga with a hard g and it stuck
:)
We still say a hard g! In Holland people talk with an hard g, and does it suck? No, it's funny because nobody else can pronounce it
If at first you don't succeed, then sky diving definitely isn't for you.
The Marine's are allowed to touch Electrical things??????? This is NOT GOOD!!!!!
-Never believe in the end of something great, send it to sub-committee for further study!!! - ME
The power source for the hover conversion is implied to be gas, but, hey, we need a new branch for physics for the hover technology anyway.
And no, I found it on Google.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And/or compete to become a market leader in sustainable power. While they're still profiting off oil, they could figure out better fusion reactors.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
Or you or I must yield up his life to Ahrimanes. I would rather it were you.
I should have no hesitation in sacrificing my own life to spare yours, but
we take stock next week, and it would not be fair on the company.
-- J. Wellington Wells
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