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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.
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 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
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
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; }
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...
In the Czech Republic children are given E. coli to help prevent allergies.
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.
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.
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.)
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)
What's the price of 50g. of sugar?
I can nip down the supermarket and buy a bag of sugar for 54p (0.54GBP). This bag contains 1Kg of sugar. So 50g. of sugar would cost under 3p.
So threepence worth of sugar would keep my 40 watt light bulb on for eight hours.
If electricty is charged at 6p per Kw/h (can't remember exactly, not got electricity bill on me) then the cost of lighting that 40w bulb is just under 2p. So there's not a lot in it!
However this is mere nitpicking and missing the point entirely. At the moment they're using sugar in the prototype. They intend to refine the bio-generator to use first carrots rather than pure sugar, and move on household waste. STUFF YOU THROW AWAY and is therefore worthless. At that point, the running cost is effectively zero.
So not only would this reduce the amount of rubbish thrown away by the average household, but it also reduces environmental damage done by power generation.
Just don't throw your old antibiotics in it!
"Information wants to be paid"
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.
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!
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.
There has been a case recently in the UK of people running their Diesel cars off cooking oil thus saving 40p per litre. Police set up a 'frying squad' to sniff out cars which smelt like mobile chip shops, and local supermarkets rationed sales of cooking oil.
It's quite ingenious, though highly illegal...
"Information wants to be paid"
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.
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.