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Bacteria Powered Batteries
Agent Provocateur writes "SpaceDaily reports on
a battery that is powered by chemical reactions caused by bacteria.
A Pentagon-backed project, University of Massachusetts researchers Swades Chaudhuri, an Indian, and Derek Lovley, an American, say the battery's source is an underground bacterium that gobbles up sugar and converts its energy into electricity.
Their prototype device ran flawlessly without refuelling for up to 25 days and is cheap and stable." The chemistry behind this thing isn't really that complex - keeping the bacteria alive and kicking during that time is prolly the tougher part - you can read more on Al Jazeera, and USA Today. Now, what about replacing this battery?
Right movie, wrong reference. You're thinking of "Mr Fusion", the thing Doc threw trash (banana peels, beer, and the can itself) into to power the Delorean.
Flux Capacitor was inside the car, in the back seat area, and was shown as a Y shape.
Similar to this Vehicle?
http://www.howstuffworks.com/news-item107.htm
http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/goto.html?c-melhui
Mr Fusion doesn't feed the DeLorean, it powers the Flux Capacitor, as the whole plot of episode 1 revolved around the lack of plutonium. The DeLorean itself is powered by gas (which again is the whole plot in episode 3)
The reason raw sugar won't work, is because it will kill the ecoli. The water content in the bug is much higher than that in the surrounding media(pure sugar in this case). The water will will move towards the region of the high sugar content (following the gradient of high water concentration to low). This will dessicate the ecoli and kill them.
There was an article on this nearly a year ago. As soon as I saw this, I assumed I was looking at a dupe. However, the earlier battery was developed in England, and part of the goal was to eventually have the battery run not off of pure sugar, but rather garbage. As you can imagine, witty comments about Mr. Fusion and the general cleaniness level of geeks ensued.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
It was the episode where Homer became an astronaut. He was up on the shuttle, and he ended up breaking an ant farm and releasing all the ants. So the ants were floating around in the microgravity, and when Kent Brockman was relaying the story on the news, the picture that came in from the shuttle was an ant on the camera, and many floating around in the background.
(A page on the episode, with the quote)
So Kent Brockman says:
"Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
Great episode. A very good one to watch, if you get a chance.
*honks*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
The Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at the University of the West of England has demonstrated a robot doing phototaxis, powered entirely by a microbial fuel cell.