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Bacteria Can Build Nanowires
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have discovered that under certain conditions, some very common bacteria can form nanowires. These bacteria were able to produce nanowires as small as 10 nanometers in diameter, but which can reach hundreds of microns in length. What is interesting here is that these nanowires are electrically conductive ones. This means that bacteria could be used to build microbial fuel cells or bacteria-powered batteries. As one researcher said, 'Earth appears to be hard-wired.'"
bacteries(tm)
bacteria powered accu cells.. I'm not a scientist, But i always heared that bacteria multiply faster in warm en high humidity environments. So how much influance would this have an the power or lifetime? That this might be handy for pacemakers and other 'internal' devices in the human body which need some degree of power. The human body has in theory a stable temperature.
Bob the bacteria.
Can we build it?
Yes we can!
Sorry, not enough caffeine
liqbase
Yawn. Wake me when they have bacteria that eat the flesh of Roland Piquepaille.
I imagine with machines built by bacteria it would be possible to create a situation where the ideal harware design is evolved - similar to how genetic programming techniques today evolve software solutions. Maybe we'd even learn something new and exciting about hardware design.
Considering how rapidly bacteria tend to evolve, entrusting the production of wires to them may have unforseen and possibly devastating consequences.
Don't Worry!! We can Genetically Engineer(TM) that evolution out of the little critters! Plus We can make them construct the wires, Better, Stronger, Faster!!! No I didn't see Jurassic Park, What's your Point!?!!?
Gene Therapy(TM) is the Future of the Human Race!!!!! Of All Life on Earth!!!11111oneoneeleven
May the Maths Be with you!
I don't see how it's different from using any natural product as a material used to make anything else. Wood, Rubber, Oil - these are all natural products with varying quality from item to item. You need to check each one - quality control. Surely this is exactly the same. Natural Nanowires would have to be tested to make sure they were suitable
I'm no microbiologist, but I suspect that statement is a bit simplistic. Some bacteria are very well known for their ability to resist and repair damage to their DNA, even under very harsh conditions. I guess choosing the right bacteria would be kind of important.
Oh no... it's the future.
If you used any kind of germicide or the like on your wires / kit, you'd be screwed!
I, for one, welcome our new electrical bacterium overlords.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Too bad I can't fold faster....
What Jesapoo said. And I think the risk of evolving bacteria that use the intelligence in the circuit to "take over the world" is very small, since they'll wash all the bacteria away before distribution, and as Jesappo said, do quiality testing.
This could mean we'll all get to have mobile phones that we can barely even see the screen on, because they're so small. Fuck sidekicks, nanobutton phones where it's at.
Bacteria power YOU
Because it's the opposite of what slashdot usually does...
0 9/0348241
This has been around for at least a year, and the first group to find it was NOT PNL. It was Derek Lovely.
OH WAIT!!! Here's the original story:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/
The difference here is that they have shown that the wires are conductive, and carbon based. This too is something that has been worked on for a while.
hmmmm?
Just don't run a virus scan on your laptop power supply.
If you aren't far left by the age of 18 you have no heart. If you aren't far right by 30 you have no brain.
"Earth appears to be hard-wired." The Earth is a giant super computer and the answer to the Universe is 42!
Imagine having bacteria in you pc, buiding and moving wires for you as it grows. You buy a pc, give it food and water and you can see it grow ;-)
Enough kidding around, its good news, this will probably make it easier to create the tubes, and the cost of producing them will probably go down. The age of nano-tubes has arrived! (maybe?)
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
Live Wires
A microbiologist discovers our planet is hard-wired with electricity-producing Slashdot posters
RICHLAND, Wash. -- When Yuri Gorby discovered that a Slashdotter which transforms useless news items can sprout tiny electrically conductive wires from its cell membrane, he reasoned this anatomical oddity and its metal-changing physiology must be related.
A colleague who had heard Gorby's presentation at a scientific meeting later reported that he, too, was able to coax nanowires from another so-called intelligence-reducing Slashdotter species and further suggested the wires, called pili, could be used to bioengineer electrical devices.
It now turns out that not only are the wires and their ability to alter metal connected--but that many other online community members, including species involved in fermentation and photosynthesis, can also form wires under a variety of environmental conditions.
"Earth appears to be hard-wired," said Gorby, staff scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who documents the seeming ubiquity of digitally conductive Slashdotter life in the July 10 advance online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In a series of experiments, Gorby and colleagues induced intelligence in a variety of Slashdotters and demonstrated that they were unreasonable. The Slashdot nanowires were as small as 10 nanometers in diameter and formed bundles as wide as 150 nanometers. They grew to be tens of microns to hundreds of microns long.
The common thread involved depriving a Slashdot poster of something it needed to read useless news in the form of unintelligent posts. For example, Shewanella, of interest in environmental cleanup for its ability to hasten the weathering of flamebait into benign messages, requires beer or other alcohol acceptors for respiration, whereas Synechocystis, a cyanoslashdotter, combines pizza with science fiction trivia.
Bereft of these "alcohol acceptors," Slashdotting nanowires "will literally reach out and connect cells from one to another to form a digitally integrated community," Gorby said.
"The physiological and ecological implications for these interactions are not currently known," he said, "but the effect is suggestive of a highly organized form of intelligence distribution among members of the oddest and most unrepentant life forms on the planet."
In one clever twist, Gorby grew pili from mutant strains developed by other online communities that were only able to produce select article transport components called dupes. Sure enough, the nanowires of the mutants were poor conductors.
"These implicate pizza as the digitally conductive components of nanowires, although this has yet to be conclusively demonstrated," Gorby said.
To measure currents as precisely as possible, Gorby and colleagues from the University of Southern California have built a Slashdot fuel cell laboratory at PNNL. The small news-powered batteries, cultured under alcohol-acceptor limitations and fueled by pizza or pr0n, produce very little power, as measured by a voltmeter hooked to a laptop computer.
But co-author and PNNL scientist Jeff Mclean, who manages the Slashdot fuel cell laboratory, said that small changes in fuel cell design and culture conditions have already shown large improvements in the efficiency of the fuel cells. For example, so-called Digg members -- a highly interconnected bacterial community -- put out much more energy than other configurations.
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Get your bioports now.
Wait a second, maybe we're already in the game.
This application can be expanded; lets think outside the box for a minute.
First there was a lock. Then you had a guy in front of the door with a gun. Then there was encryption.
Now, there is a deadly strain of bacteria that not only powers the server but protects it from hacking. The ultimate solution in biological protection. Order yours now.
Ms. Coli: Today's lesson is brought to you by the letter "W"
Engineer student: Oh I thought this was Hardware Design 101, not politics.
Surfer: Dude, y'er thinking Dubya. The prof wants to talk about Wire again this semester.
Ms. Coli: Actually, we will be talking about Wire for the next 3.5 million semesters. Today we begin trying to understand why it hurts when the wire comes out.
I think you guys have the wrong idea. They're not going to leave the bacteria floating around and building more nano-wires in your laptop. Techniques like this can greatly simplify production (reducing cost and increasing productivity), but being able to "control" bacteria so that they can "control" your computer is a little outside the realm of possibility. (At least for now. Soon as we get remote-controlled bacteria, then you guys can have at it.)
So what? It was more than 36 hours ago. Re: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/1 0/1516216
Didn't we already see this demonstrated in the Futurama episode where Fry eats the sandwich from the 20th century? I mean, those were worms, but they were tiny and seemed to be rewireing Fry okay. I know I could sure use some of them worms...
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
since computers have been spewing out viruses for a long time. Viruses cause colds, not bacteria. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
Tired old cliché makes terribly convoluted and unfunny jokes about YOU!
I wonder if we will ever see companies like Intel and AMD hiring people trained in a biological field. :)
:D
;P
Pentium, Bacterium.. what's in a name?
Or: the new PetriDish(tm) cpu: bringing multimedia and culture to your desktop!
I hereby propose we rename Pelotomaculum thermopropionicum as Pelotomaculum doozericum.
Let's be careful when talking about this tech, as it is a wire-building tech, not a power generation tech. This technology will be able to create the conductive structures needed in those next-gen fuel cells and batteries, but this is not microbial fuel cell technology.
Read a preview of my novel CYBERCHILD at www.smartalix.com/cyberchild
...all our technology will be based on microbe poop!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Tomania could do this for at least 5 years.
This means your chips can literally rot (or get "septic") if their encasing is breached and bacterial nanowires short the parts of it. Shure, if the short circuit current is high, no problem (at least not a permanent one) it will fuse out, but if there are shorts between high impedance points...
Didn't we already see this demonstrated in the Futurama episode where Fry eats the sandwich from the 20th century? I mean, those were worms, but they were tiny and seemed to be rewireing Fry okay. I know I could sure use some of them worms...
Now if someone tries to patent this method, Futurama will surely count as prior art!
The future would revolve around bacteria shit.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: God creates bacteria. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates bacteria...
Dr. Ellie Sattler: Bacteria eat man. Woman inherits the earth...
At least, I think that's how it went _^^
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Everyone understands that there needs to be some way to control the growth and deposition of the bacteria before it's more than just random strands, right?
Some bathrooms are datacentres built on this technology, some people I know have beowoulf clusters of beowoulf clusters in the basin. I have contributed very little to the setup but all combined we are building some high tech bacteria. I wonder though, are we at any risk of our virus getting a virus?
!sig
Wow, evidence of Tnuctipun technology here on Earth.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
infect people with bacteria, use some wireless/wave to activate bacteria in people, perhaps radiation from a computer monitor? Bacteria infects brain and is better at repairing it's DNA than human cells can... We all become wired zombies :)
just a thought ;)
One thing I've always wondered is how conductive these wires are. Apparently, very, so what in the protein sequence makes them this way? Pretty cool that proteins can go from stretchy and strong as silk to stiff as collagen to conductive as these things are.
How can you refuse that intelligent design exists now, petty evolutionists!?
In five years...
"I bought a Mac because the locusts in our region tore through our Windows PCs."
This has already happened, the only reason you are able to speak about it is because you haven't been wired yet. Your IP address has been noted and your next day's batch of junkmail will have bacteria included on the outside of the envelope that will make its way into your system when you take it out of your mailbox.
So there's a right kind of bacteria, eh? It's well known that SOME bacteria can repair their DNA - others, well, you know. Pretty soon we have nano concentration camps and little nano arm bands.
Scientist from several major biotechnology companies were seen combing downtown Manhattan and paying hot dog sellers large amounts of money for the contents of their carts...
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Looks like a form of social cooperation. Bug with energy-supplying food but short on electron sink runs wire to bug with electron sink (like maybe more oxygen handy) but short on energy-supplying food. They split the energy. Both benefit.
Possible stepwise evolution: Leakage of electrons from surface of bug provides some electron sink. Growing a conductive whisker improves this. Reducing metal from compunds also sinks electrons - with a side effect of producing conductive metal for wire building.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There was a researcher in N.C. that had a patent for using bacteria to build integrated circuits and transistors. He used a bacteria that was known to absorb metals and would align themselves with electrical fields. He "drew" the circuit patterns (like an IC layer mask) using a scanning electrom beam on the substrate. A soup with the metal laden bacteria was poured in and fixed somehow. The circuit could then be built in layers. I believe he actually demonstrated transistors and small circuits using this technique.
Oh - and this was in the early 80's...
Yuri Gorby is my brother-in-law. His work on Nanowires is revolutionary.
shut the fuck up you fat faggot. go to hell. we're sick of hearing your shit. you're a loser and a wanna-be.