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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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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 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.
nickel-cadmium, lead-acid, nickel metal hydride, carbon-zinc, lithium... ummmm, it makes my mouth water.