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Banana Power!

ackthpt writes "What do you do with rotten bananas, assuming you don't have 1337 5k1ll2 in baking banana bread? Especially a bit of a quandry if you grow bananas and 30% of your crop goes to waste? Bill Clarke, an engineering lecturer at the University of Queensland has devised a way to generate electric power, potentially enough for 500 homes, from the waste of Northern Queensland banana plantations. Nuts and bolts issues like if it's ultimately practical to haul the bananas, decompose them to methane and disposal of waste have yet to be worked out -- don't expect this to power your laptop just yet."

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Will there still be bananas in ten years? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This project might fail just as it gets going. Some people say bananas are going to die out.

  2. bananapocalypse by Tom7 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But what about the bananapocalypse?

  3. Re:Banana Bread, recipe courtesy of Emeril Lagasse by Solder+Fumes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sheesh. It's easy as pie!

    Forgive me, that was cheap. But really, even I have absorbed enough cooking knowledge to know what creaming butter and sugar together is. And it's really not hard to figure out, just like it's not that hard to figure out what new command you'll have to master to get that script working.

    If anything, the Internet has probably affected the world of coding first, and the world of cooking next. Both fields require judicious application of ingredients and basic formulas, and both allow room for infinite creative variations from those formulas. In order to share this creativity, each has evolved a standard jargon that practicers of the art will learn. Both have benefitted amazingly from the free trade of information that the internet allows. A search on Google for practically any aspect of cooking or coding will produce thousands of examples and opinions, source code and recipes.

    So a coder mentions doing a "simple quicksort algorithm" and a pastry maker mentions "cutting the flour into the butter until pea-sized." Neither indicates the methods or tools required. But in both cases, the barest of inquiries will reveal the meaning and logic behind them.