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Bacteria As Fuel Cells?
KantIsDead writes "MIT's Tech Review is running an interview with Boston University Bioengineer Tim Gardner about the possibility of using bacteria to produce electricity. If fuel cells running off sugar are nearly here, alcohol-powered robots cannot be far." From the article: "While typical fuel cells use hydrogen as fuel, separating out electrons to create electricity, bacteria can use a wide variety of nutrients as fuel. Some species, such as Shewanella oneidensis and Rhodoferax ferrireducens, turn these nutrients directly into electrons. Indeed, scientists have already created experimental microbial fuel cells that can run off glucose and sewage. Although these microscopic organisms are remarkably efficient at producing energy, they don't make enough of it for practical applications."
Have they tried feeding them Taco Bell?
Alcohol powered robots can bite my shiny metal ass!
I like my beverages with warning labels!
Couldn't this be considered somehow as animal cruelty?
No Sigs!
How exactly do you take full atomic structures and "turn these nutrients directly into electrons"? Even if you were able to release the electrons from the atoms the whole material remains, neutrally charged does it not?
Porn for Nerds. Stuff that matters
I am more impressed with that Montreal kid who did something similiar:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70882-0.ht
Kartik Madiraju, an 11th-grader from Montreal, was able to generate about half the voltage of a normal AA battery with a fifth of an ounce of naturally occurring magnetic bacteria. And the bacteria kept pumping current for 48 hours nonstop.
"alcohol-powered"
"glucose and sewage"
The future will be full of cars that only exaust water....and fueling stations brimming with switch-grass, corn-mash, stale beer, human feces, and the occasional Rhodoferax ferrireducens bateria. And I thought horses smelled bad....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Ok, assume that in 3 years we find just the right bacteria we need, and can have big
enough colonies of them to be useful. How do we stop them from just mutating into
non-viable types of their former selves and corrupting the colony? Sure they would
reproduce asexually and that would limit mutations compared to our dirty process
with gametes and zygotes, but that small rate of mutation will definitely be amplified
by the apparent fact that we'll need trillions of these bacteria to do anything large-scale.
IAABM (I am a biology major)
I invented this concept years ago. Step 1: Get my feet really worked up and sweaty while trapped in a tight shoe -- this spurs bacterial growth Step 2: Take off shoe and attack roommate with it -- roommate runs away from the stink, but he is roped onto a treadmill Step 3: The kinetic energy from the treadmill's movement is converted into electrical energy. I've just been working on creating a pocket sized roommate/treadmill, I was pretty darn close too.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
1) What if the bacteria escape from the implant and spread through my body?
2) Could an antibiotic cure for an unrelated infection kill my artificial heart?
Neither can power plugs that you can directly plug into your ass after ingesting healthy amounts of symbiotic bacteria.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Yes.
see also:
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/5/23/3693
bacteria + rotting biomass has long been able to produce energy.
I can see this is new because it produces hydrogen as opposed to other gasses, but is a hydrogen economy that much better than a methane economy if it is based on biomass?
Maybe in 50 years time?
Ok I'll mod myself Troll now...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
If you provide an constant, optimum climate for your strain, however, there wouldn't be a great deal of evolutionary pressure forcing them to mutate into non-viable types.
I'm not sure this is a good assumption. If the bacteria were a product of genetic engineering and not selective breeding in that environment, they might be easily overwhelmed by a mutant strain that was more suited to the environment, but less useful to us. For example, we might engineer bacteria that produce electricity, but do it at the expense of reproduction rate. If a mutant strain appeared that didn't have that characteristic (i.e. if it didn't produce as much electricity but reproduced faster) then it would probably overtake the preferred/engineered strain.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It would be unlikely for the bacteria to spontaneously mutate out 2 genes at once, thereby subverting our design. Obviously bacteria, number in the billions, so it will be necessary to restock our fuel cell occasionally. Of course you could be clever and tie in a third gene that gives immunity to a toxic substance, so that non-desired mutated bacteria are killed off automatically.
..........FULL STOP.
No one tell the computers, or they won't have any reason to keep us alive after they take over.
Plus the bacteria won't need an elaborate VR to keep them occupied while generating electricity.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
There's something wrong with this sentence. It sounds like they're saying that the bacteria perform an efficient conversion of the sugar energy into electrical energy, but that the problem is that bacteria can't be scaled effectively to produce significant amounts of power.
There's a problem with the idea that bacteria don't scale. Bacteria are well known for their exponential growth curves. Give me a sufficently large petri dish with medium and a starter batch of bacteria, and I'll solve your scaling dilemma.
If they are truly efficient, then there's no problem with bacteria not making enough power, as making more bacteria is trivial. However, I don't think it's likely they really are efficient. It seems highly unlikely bacteria would waste much energy on producing unused electricity, one might expect them, like most living things, to use most of their available energy growing, respirating, reproducing, and anything else that generally falls under the category of "surviving." Sure enough, later in the article comes:
Gardner's team aims to harness the genetic control system to engineer bacteria that can produce energy more efficiently.
Which makes me think that the problem with the current bacteria is efficiency, not scalability, as the first sentence implies. Perhaps by "efficient" he means that they don't produce a lot of waste heat or something, but for generating electricity, the definition of efficiency should be what percent of the energy they take in they put back out as electricity.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
The world has found a use for politicians...
Now you'll be asking people to piss in your gas tank!
"...alcohol-powered robots cannot be far."
Some of them work in the cubicle next to mine...
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
It's "Bite my shiny metal ass".