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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?
Is it on the back of a Delorean?
Now I finally have a use for all that old pizza stacked up in the corner of my room......
"A clean green technology? Commie hippie anti-capitalist root-eating sons of socialists!" ::CEO starts having a heart attack::
Similar to this Vehicle?
i wonder what the bastard will smell like.. if it isn't pleasant, might take a while to gain acceptance.
then again, if it smells like garbage, maybe it could attract flies, and maybe the flies could feed it.. ah, that would be funny.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/news-item107.htm
to turn leftover food into gas!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/goto.html?c-melhui
I've been running my fridge that way for years now!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Can you run your fridge off what's closest to the back in there?
-- Free speech is only free if your time is worth nothing.
Scientists say 50 grammes of sugar would keep a 40-watt light bulb lit for eight hours.
Now, what I will do, is to just connect this liposuction device with me and their innovation, turn my fat into hydrogen and fuel my car. I assume my excess kgs of excess fat will take me to whereever I want. Haha! Here we come McDonald's!
Imagine,
a stack of left over pizza suspended by a magnet waiting above "the Pit". when the power drops, the pizza drops.... voila, instant power back-up...
Need more power???, just add pizza.
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
The reason Santa is so jolly is that he knows where all the bad girls live.
"It has to be able to use raw materials, rather than giving it refined fuel."
Huh? I for one would happily buy one if it could run my 40W max laptop for 8 hours on an ounce and a half (about 50 grams) of refined sugar. Why does it need further refinement before use?
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)
A colony of e-coli bacteria? Like I don't already have enought of that shit floating round my kitchen.
From the article:
This I want to power my car. And laptop. And house appliances (not just so that I can pour coffee on my computer to recharge the battery)
This solves the hydrogen-storing problem in the hydrogen powered vehicles: no more dangerous concentration of hydrogen, instead you get a small tank containing bubbling "mud". Not quite inflammable in case of a collision.
Add to this that it's hardly polluting (just as much as taking a dump in a bosquet, I'd say), and it even helps reducing the amount of houseold garbage (Powerplants recycling garbage, anyone ?).
The main aspect of this energy source is that it completely suppress the need for combustion. Instead it uses slow, catalyzed, controlled chemical processes that use a lower amount of initial energy. No more smoke.
Maybe I'm overstating all this, but it definitely looks cool. And it's cheap, too. Carrot-powered car, coming our way !
will suddenly be in demand on long flights
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.
What I need is a back yard composter/fertilizer dispenser/generator that I can throw leaves, grass (actually I mulch these now), kitched scaps (sugar cubes, carrots, etc).
I sell the extra energy back to the power grid, and spread the fertilizer on my yard.
No wait, this would make to much ecological/economic sense, I must be some kind of hippie, tree hugger, freak.
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.
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.
Be sure your batteries get plenty of fiber to avoid constipation.
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.
Now when we say our battery died, we'll mean it literally.
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.
This sounds like a neat power source for nano-technology. Power the nanobots off the sugar in the bloodstream.
And some get entered just to remove sugar from the bloodstreams of diabetics. Where do I sign up for that? (I'm a type II diabetic already, this could stave off more drastic treatment for years.)
Walk away from the conference table for a few seconds, when you come back there are no doughnuts left! Just a laptop and cell phone sitting there innocently. They'll never tell....
...
. . . for the bacteria.
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.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
83% Efficient? Thats impressive, if true. If you think that a typical car engine is only 20% efficient. Maybe one day you could run your car on Glucose..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
I wonder how safe these bacteria are? Not in any fearful way, but could they
be used to power an artificial heart, getting the sugar from the body? Perhaps
power artificial limbs?
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
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 doesn't state how much sugar it needs, nor the cost for electricity based on sugar prices. Any chemist know how 83% efficiency translates into cost and amount of sugar needed for a certain amount of power consumption?
Question everything.
Free the battery bacteria!
No slavery for electricity!
How many Rhodoferax died for your Walkman today?
Single-celled life forms are people too!
Et cetera, et cetera....
"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.
Can't believe nobody said it yet, but
I for one welcome our new bacteria overlords..
-- jaf
I can imagine the new movie already....
Are you planning to eat these batteries or something? I'd imagine the bacteria would be prevented from spreading by being outside of it's natual habitat, underground.
I've got a scary fact for you. All of the surfaces around you are covered in bacteria. Even that chair, even your bottle of soap, even the water faucets. You cant get away from them. They're everywhere. If you aren't in a full fledged panic yet, you might remember that humans have lived with bactera for as long as their have been humans. The vast majority of them are harmless to humans.
It's also unlikly that a company would release a battery that killed everyone who bought it, and traditional batteries aren't exactly nice to the environment, so the bar is not set very high for these things to be more eco-friendly.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'm still wondering if this variety of battery would have any ethyl alcohol output...
I could use a laptop battery that puts out a nice little shot of vodka for the end of the day. This feature could also motivate users to take very-good care of their bacteria.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
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.
Have you read USA Today before?
From Al Jazeera:
"The bug in question is Rhodoferax ferriducens, which was found in airless sediment deep below ground at a terrestrial site at Oyster Bay, Virginia, and identified as a promising candidate for oxidising simple sugars."
USA Today:
"Bacteria are tiny living things. So tiny you can't even see them with your eyes! You need a microscope to see them. Microscopes help scientists see very small things."
note: usa today quote made up for fun's sake.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde