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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.
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 :(
Why? We are exposed to harmful bacteria all the time, almost all of us have e.coli in our intestines. That is why we wash our hands after going to the bathroom. Or after hadeling raw hamburger or chicken. Just make sure people know that they will get a tummy ache if they eat the stuff.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
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.
I dunno about carrots, but with sugar cubes, fruit and a little yeast, you'll get something with power in a few weeks, fer sure! Maybe the carrots are to stop you from going blind?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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"...
Most strains of E. Coli are harmless in normal concentrations, and indeed live in your gut without causing any problems at all. Students at universities/colleges worldwide use it in concentrated culture all the time without any special precautions. Only E. Coli 10571 (iirc), a weird mutant strain, poses a food poisoning risk.
Bob
Finally i have use for all pizza slices all over my desk. Must be a godsend for geeks.
HTTP/1.1 400
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; }
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...
woo hooo we can now get rid of the internal combustion engine!
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
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)
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.
In the Czech Republic children are given E. coli to help prevent allergies.
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.)
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?
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)
I also think it is a bit of stretch to say that this is a "weird mutant strain" since there are plenty other types of E. coli that can cause diarrhea via food poisoning (including the closing related Enteropathogenic E. coli. Incidentally, O157:H7 doesn't seem to hurt adult cattle too much, it just seems to have a really bad effect inside us (particularly children and elderly).
Brian.
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.
E. Coli is extremely well used as a research and teaching tool. It makes me cringe when I hear the press talking about it as a cause of food poisoning. Certain strains as you say are definitely not nice but without a friendly strain of E. Coli, we wven have a problem as the gut can more easily be colonised by nastier strains.
See my journal, I write things there
-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...
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.
Suddenly, all that "important septic tank information" spam I get is just another variation on "make money fast".
Maran
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?
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.
Absolutely - ignorant media hype at work again. The pricks almost always get science wrong. The worst thing is that so many people fall for it.
The real reason that Escherichia Coli gets such bad press is a mere side effect of that it's such a common and incredibly populous inhabitant of a healthy human intestinal tract. That's what makes it such an excellent indicator of untreated sewage content.
When you're investigating possible sewage pollution, there's no point beginning with looking for the rare stuff that's dangerous in needle & haystack concentrations. No, you're better off counting the numbers of something that you're guaranteed to find, and extrapolating from there.
Of course, the media then jumps to the conclusion that, because a high E. Coli count probably means Really Bad Things are in the water, E. Coli itself becomes a Really Bad Thing.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
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
I imagine they will build the device so the actual reaction chamber (artifical gut?) would be enclosed. The hydrogen gas generated by the bacteria is converted to electricity and water vapor. Assuming rotten food is used, there will be waste from that. This leads me to the (obvious) question -- what kind of solid waste will this system produce and how will it be removed from the unit? We all know what the solid waste output from humans and animals is, so will the solid waste output from this unit be similar? I can see it now -- cleaning up dog crap, changing the litter box, and cleaning out the "organic battery" crap! I csn see it now -- "Honey, I got to take the car out to take a dump!"
Oh well, if the price is right, I guess I can handle disposing of a little more crap...
Beware of Sleestak
nickel-cadmium, lead-acid, nickel metal hydride, carbon-zinc, lithium... ummmm, it makes my mouth water.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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
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.
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.
Easy -- make the dough out of grains genetically engineered to absorb iron from the soil.
My deviantArt site
My joke was based on the fact that Hawaii is now a state (as of 1959) unless of course you are pushing the agendas of groups like The Hawaiian Kinkgom.
Fact: *ALL* of the U.S. was 'taken' from the indigenous peoples by 'invaders'.
Sugar production is one of the things Hawaii is known for. Now, while I could have said "Lets invade Louisianna" it wouldn't have been as funny, because far less people know that Louisianna is a large sugar producer.
It was a joke that was not meant to offend anybody. I didn't make any kind of derogatory remarks towards any culture or ethnicity, so don't try to play Political Corrctness games.
There are plenty of groups claiming that the U.S. (and/or Canada and Mexico) don't have sovreignty in a particular region of the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, Florida, Texas, Vermont, and a whole slew of other places.
Now, how can you judge me of being unaware of history from 1 line of text? Research indicates George Washington most likely didn't have wooden teeth...but it makes for some funny jokes.
You accuse my comment of being trollish, but yours is what exactly? If I hadn't already commented in this discussion I would use my moderation points to mark you down.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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
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.
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)