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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.
If your leftovers consist of sugar cubes and carrots. I mean, come on!
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
In the Czech Republic children are given E. coli to help prevent allergies.
40W bulb * 8 hours = 40 J/s * 8 hr = 1,152,000 J
50g sugar * 4 Cal/g = 200 Cal = 800,000 J
Aren't they off by a factor of 2?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
They would probably sell granules like the ones they sell for septic tanks, to "refresh" your battery.
---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.
Actually, 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.