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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?
1. The article says that to obtain 40 watts of power you need many such cells. I wonder exactly how many. More than will fit into my laptop case?
2. Besides sugar, the cell needs some mysterious 'redox chemicals'. How expensive they are? Can they be produced environmentally-friendly? Are they safe to store? So, this might or might not be a great invention.
But localizing the energy production is a bit silly.
..
With this method, you run into the same problems that we have with automobiles and other gas powered devices. They are less efficient than large scale counterparts, which leads to waste energy, lost in poor engines, and exhaust.
It seems to make more sense to be to centralize the "compost" and generate electricity that way. This would keep bacteria in one place, and minimize the lost energy. It really wouldn't be any different than a power plant.
infact i'm pretty sure that's already been done. What are the benefits to localizing the energy generation? I can't see any. People will have to clean the devices, organic matter doesn't rot away into nothing. There are components to the waste generated by the bacteria organisms. you cant really stick in food and have it *all* gone
i see problems that are going to be difficult to fix. We already have a huge waste management system. It wouldn't be that much of a stretch for waste management to begin compost of organic waste and become power stations with the tech available. then the generated energy can just be stored in traditional batteries. it doesnt seem that these organic batteries offer any improved life over chemical batteries at all.
I don't even know where to begin! Converting organic matter to electricity on demand on a portable scale - and you dismiis it as silly!
I'm a bit rusty on my recycling but:
- Primary: re-use for original purpose (e.g.
second-hand clothes)
- Secondary: re-use for alternative purpose (e.g. clothes as wiping rags)
- Tertiary: reclamation of materials (e.g. clothes as paper fibre)
- Quaternery: reclamation of energy (e.g. burning the clothes to warm you up)
So unless you like eating someone elses left-overs, want to replant the seeds of the tomato they've eaten, or make a halloween pumpkin, you are left with energy or land-fill. Silly energy!?I simply don't understand the argument that it is more efficient to gather the waste to a central location (by truck?), burn/convert it there, transmit across a high voltage line to your house, charge a NiCd, etc, than to stuff your leftovers in a CD size case and get energy provided by nature's best organic catalysts in the middle of no-where, or at the bottom of your loo.
Or were you planning to hook up all of Africa to the American grid? This would be ideal for families in developing countries to run a lamp bulb (or radio, or even a computer) off after 6 p.m. on the equator.
Gaah, nuff said.
While this development certainly sounds interesting, calling something cheap and stable based soley on a prototype wihout major major long-term testing seems to be jumping the gun a little.
What happens when these batteries rupture, bringing cultured bacteria to the surface to wreak havoc on all living beings?
/tinfoil
I'm telling you, it's SARS from cars.
The downside, however, is that it's a slow process. That cup of sugar could take weeks to digest. Still, a slow but steady trickle of electricity can be used to charge up a battery, which can then discharge large amounts of power when needed.
Obviously stacking a large cluster of these in a battery type configuration would solve the voltage/current supply issue.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
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But the idea of sugar-powered nanobots is pretty nifty, so give yourself a triple word score & I can avoid the "M" word. Seems that those nanobots would need some pretty sophisticated membrane technology, though...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
No offence intended, but rather than waiting for nano-robots to cure you, perhaps you should eat proper foods and exercise. That would stave off more drastic treatment for years, certainly.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
"Where we are now is where solar power was 20 or 30 years ago." So we have a few more decades to bicker about it while they make a working device.
I know this will be modded OffTopic, but I think it important to reply to this (and I have karma to burn).
It is important to see the other man's point of view. One of the problems in Iraq at the moment is incomprehsnsion between the US forces and the locals. I agree that Al Jazeera does reflect an anti-US viewpoint. However, it does not create such a viewpoint - it reflects that of the world in which it lives. AJ is not killing US soldiers - is just speaks the same language as people who are. If you disregard all Arabs as "anti US terrorists", you will never achieve enough understanding if the Arab world to retire from Iraq gracefully.
Apart from the fact that the AJ piece is an amost exact dupe of the SpaceDaily article, it is an entirely impartial report about a piece of US innovation. It makes the US look good. What is bad about quoting an Arab source saying good things about the US? You need that - Arabs don't read the New York Times, they read Al Jazeera.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
The process that is core to this experiment(breaking down of sugar ) takes place in our bodies also. :-)
How long will it take for researchers to come up with a method to tap the extra energy in human beings(that usually gets converted to fat)? And then, when your cell goes dead - you'll have to eat more sugar
Further imagine what would happen if some major energy company decided to couple this knowledge with genetic cloning? Welcome to the real world!
even if we use "harmless" bacteria, nobody knows how they will influence our health and above all - the ecosystem - if they really are cultivated in large masses to satisfy the market for battery's. so what if the "living battery" is depleted, how do you prevent the bacteria from spreading like a wildfire and eventually mutating in something harmful? before this tech should go into large scale production, massive, and i emphazise the word !massive!, tests about the implications on human immunesystem and the ecosystem of this sort of bacteria should be conducted
".Sig Stealer" was here
A calculator uses really tiny amounts of current compared to Christmas tree lights. My calculator hasn't had a battery charge in years, and my watch has a calculator in it too. Christmas lights got to use hunderds of times more power in comparison.
As I said, no offence had been intended. I sidestepped diabetes by apparently a very very narrow step last year. My sugar levels were pretty high and I managed to put them down to normal levels through a sugar-free diet and regular aerobic exercise. I also know people who have diabetes and they simply don't care, which is weird enough since the consequences can be grave, if not lethal. One of them reflected what I thought was the point of your post "there will eventually be a cure so why should I diet", something I find stupid, especially since he's fast approaching 200 kilos. It was that attitude I was replying to, not the specific of your situation - you actually have my sympathies as well as my apology for any offence perceived.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
As biological systems, these battery bacteria should be susceptible to a host of illnesses -- viruses (called bacteriophages), mold, other bacteria, etc.. Swiping a packet of sugar from the restaurant to fuel a laptop might get you some extra surfing time (about half an hour according to my back-of-the-envelope-calcs) or it may get you some nasty battery disease. Will we need public service announcements on practicing safe laptop recharging?
Sugar may be cheap, but sterilized sugar solution in a handy refill cartridge will cost a pretty penny. And, yes, it only means more sweet spam.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Yoghurt contains mass produced bacteria.
Most soft cheeses like Camenbert and Brie depend on bacteria for their production.
Bacteria is used in most sewerage treatment plants.
You're hatching them in your gut and every day you shit them. Multiply that by everyone in your city, the world etc and be very afraid. Ie you are mass producing them.
Did you know living in an environment artificially depleted of bacteria (eg too much bleach), can increase your chances of things like Asthma?
Bacteria are used every day by farmers to control other pests like mould and fungus and caterpillers (dipel). (Ironically penicillin is a fungus to control bacteria). Bacteria are also important to good quality soil and natural recycling of vegetation and animal manure.
It probably wouldn't be a good idea to eat your phone battery, but that's no reason to be afraid of it.
Bacteria only multiply out of control in very favourable conditions. That's why they say you should keep your food refrigerated or boiling ie keep your food at temperatures not conducive to growing toxic bacteria like some salmonella.
I suppose you still eat chicken or eggs? The salmonella is not completely eliminated, only minimised...
And bacteria doesn't generally "spread" really fast without help.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia.
Al Jazeera comes freom Qatar, where women are allowed to drive - as they are in Iraq and most of the rest of the Arab world.
You prove my point - you are treating the Arab world as if it was a monolithic whole, then apply the worst of the worst to the whole. Of cvourse Al Quaida and Saddams thugs are murderous thugs. Bu they are no more typical of the whole Arab world than the Klu Klux Klan are typical of the USA.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
All wackiness aside, this is an interesting point. Of course the article is sparse but I assume the battery allows for A) the bacteria to consume as much sugar as they wish, and B) allows them to reproduce as often as possible. And as far as I can tell, that is the sum purpose of existence for these little guys.
So then the question of 'slavery' all comes down to perspective: is it slavery when there is in fact no limitation on your lifestyle? Or is the 'sense' of slavery enough (i.e. to feel enslaved is to be enslaved)? As far as I can tell the bacteria wouldn't care. So I'd think this woul be best characterized as a symbiotic relationship.
Anyway, I'm waaayy OT but thanks for opportunity to post-jack.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Doesn't it rather depend on what the bacteria do? I can practically guarantee that you have several massive bacterial infections currently. Fortunately almost all such infections are either non-harmful, or even benign (as in one step short of symbiotic).
There would be nothing particularlly strange about designing a bacteria that could eat sugar and churn out insulin, with the levels of insulin dependant on the level of sugar. Of course, you'd need to design it to be extremely resistant to mutations, because I can thing of several mutations that would benefit the bacteria, but not the colonized individual. (And you'd probably also need to design it to be suseptible to some particular unusual anti-biotic. Preferably one that isn't used for any purpose besides removing mutated colonies.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In 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.
They didn't go on to show any especial suspicion about that, they just noted it. Later on, at the end of the article, they described the Military applications -- "the US Department of Defence was interested in it for powering underwater microphones and sonar to spot passing ships and submarines." They were quite positive, all told, describing the batteries as remarkable for a proof-of-concept. They mentioned applications in impoverished areas, using batteries working from sewage for example.
On the other hand, USA Today didn't mention the Pentagon connection, describing the scientists only as being "at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst." The USA Today story was considerably shorter, lacked Al Jazeera's detailed description of how the thing worked ("...each side containing a graphite electrode and separated by a membrane. On one side was R ferriducens swimming in a glucose solution, which it broke down into carbon dioxide (CO2) and electrons. The electrons were transported to the nearby electrode...") and just generally read much more superficially.
I wouldn't describe the Al Jazeera story as amazingly well-written -- it included some grammatical slips that read as if they'd been made in translation -- but it was a more complete bit of reporting by far, and showed no determined bias other than noting the military connection in a neutral way, IMHO.
I'd bet the story's submitter included that Al Jazeera link because it's just plain better. Take a look yourself.
(And as far as the world news thing goes, you should try to understand why it is that the Arab world watches this channel rather than the Western World's channels, which they see as bought and paid for by US corporate interests. It is a point of view, and you might want to understand it even if you don't agree.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You forget - the sugar would be from a bio source, so to make it the plant would have absorbed CO2, H2O and power from the sun & used photosythesis to make Sugar. When you burn the sugar you release that same CO2 back into the atmosphere, but there is no net increase in CO2!
The problem is probably economic, It means a lot of land to grow enough sugar to fuel lots of cars, and a lot of power harvest and to transport it about. Probably better to use solar cells/wind power & get the electric direct that way..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"