Slashdot Mirror
Breakthrough in Electricity-Producing Microbe
University of Massachusetts researchers have made a breakthrough with "Geobacter," a microbe that produces electric current from mud and wastewater. A conservative estimate puts the energy output increase at eight times that of the original organism, potentially allowing applications far beyond that of extracting electricity from mud. "Now, planning can move forward to design microbial fuel cells that convert waste water and renewable biomass to electricity, treat a single home's waste while producing localized power (especially attractive in developing countries), power mobile electronics, vehicles and implanted medical devices, and drive bioremediation of contaminated environments."
...welcome our new shit-eating overlords?
- This story stinks!
- The OP is full of shit!
- I get shitty service on my phone now!
I'll show myself out.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Obama calls for "regime change" in the Republic of Elbonia.
And in East Elbonia, they are planning on dominating the world's energy market in 20 years....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Maybe it's time to evaluate 2 girls 1 cup for educational reasons...
Then again maybe not
How should we name the unit to represent Joules Per Flush? I vote for the Crapper.
This is wonderful news. Ideas like these are the kind of things that turn energy into a free for all. Remember the water cycle? Any American was taught this process by at least middle school. IMHO creating an "Energy Cycle" is our ultimate goal here. Who knew a septic tank would end up back in style? Hook up a few power cables and whammo! Instant power station. Yes, I'm full of shit. I have the power.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
We don't have enough shit over here? we don't need electricity over here?
Why can't we use that technology to make the water treatment plants produce electricity while they also treat our wastes?Â
I'm curious if they might be able to combine this with another microbe or filtering system that would enable it to purify the water too. If they could, you could get an almost closed water system thus solving a lot of the water issues across the US. Or if it could desalinate water while producing power :)
As someone who helps to design and manufacture medical devices, I have no doubt that they could be made safely. That said, I doubt I'd be first in line to get one. I think even our current battery technology is sufficient for most implants. Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to improve.
If the technology works out, I do look forward to a home septic system that produces power for me AND saves me from tearing up my yard. (Wishful thinking, yes, but cool nonetheless.)
Anyway, regardless of whether this technology becomes a commercial success, this kind of stuff could/will be very useful down the road. Great work.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
soon we'll be purchasing dirt and instead of oil, declaring war against third world countries to steal their wastes, and those environmentalists are gonna whine about the smell.
Do you D?
So brown is the new green?
The Geobacter biofilm's "fortuitous" electron-transferring skill, the product of natural selection, suggested a pathway to Lovley - a way he might use selective pressure to increase its capacity to produce power. He and colleagues grew Geobacter as usual on a graphite electrode, providing acetate as food and allowing a colony to form the biologically active slime, or biofilm where electron transfer takes place across the nanowires. But for this new experiment they added a tiny, 400-millivolt "pushback" current in the electrode that forced Geobacter to press harder to get rid of its electrons.
The result of providing a more challenging environment, within five short months, Lovley notes, was evolution of a beefed-up microorganism that can press at least eight times more electric current across the electrode than the original strain. âoeI'm really happy with this outcome," the microbiologist notes. "It's exceptionally fast feedback to us and a very satisfying result." He adds, "I'm still a little amazed that they make electricity, but I'm happy to be exploring how to harness that ability. I'm sure there'll be applications developed in the future that we canâ(TM)t even envision right now."
That's halfway down in the article.
You should try reading things before you try to debunk them. The environment will be created to get the most electricity out of the little microbes, and probably sealed off and not thrown in the dirt. I imagine there may even be filters in place where the waste comes into make sure that any natural predators are weakened or killed to continue allowing the organisms to thrive.
And they have been studying this organism since 1987, and examining it for electrical production since 2002. I'm glad you're skeptical, but not glad that you're commenting on something you didn't even bother to read.
First, a citation to the published paper: Hana Yi, et al., Selection of a variant of Geobacter sulfurreducens with enhanced capacity for current production in microbial fuel cells, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, Volume 24, Issue 12, 15 August 2009, Pages 3498-3503.
The extrapolated current density was 7.4 ± 0.1 A/m2. The individual fuel cells produced 14mA, which was sustained for 24 months.
1. you get a tingly feeling every time you sit on the toilet, and its not from your feet falling asleep
2. if your septic tank overflows you're in danger of electrocuting the family dog
3. you also have to be careful where you piss, or you'll know what its like to urinate on the third rail of light rail system
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
MR FUSION!! http://bttf.wikia.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion
Every now and then we read about some new energy producing mean, it just makes me wonder... Can anyone even begin to imagine what would a society based on these technologies look like? They are very diverse and seem to cover ever encreasing aspects of our lives. Each one could take care of a bit of our smaller needs and nuclear energy could be the only massive one, providing for larger needs in a world with ever more energy-efficient technologies. What if through technology we can reach a society with no more big energy concerns, just by sort of cutting the sharp edges of our wastes? Anyone knows some hard science fiction dealing with this kind of society?
..."Dennis! There's some Lovely Filth down here!"...
-=JML=-
If this microbe escaped from the lab, we'd all be in trouble. Can you imagine the headlines we'd start to see all over the world?
- Man electrocuted on toilet
- Tip for rainy weather: wear well-insulated boots when walking in mud
- Tomato fields plagued by ball lightning after manure fertilization
- In the 3rd world, muddy unpaved roads power electric scooters
The idea of dipping my iPhone into the nearest bucket of shit sickens me, and yet this may become the favored means of charging one's phone in a hurry.
I suppose a welcome next step will be a second microbe that neutralizes the stench.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
... what's to stop the microbes from evolving/adapting BACK to the lower output when they're placed in a rich environment (fuel cell, whatever) again? Stupid researchers... they forget that mutation doesn't only occur when they want it to occur and not only in the fashion they desire.
[sarcasm]You're right. All this research is useless. We should just give up.[/sarcasm]
I feel like I say this constantly, but I just can't help myself here...
Just because you don't see a benefit doesn't mean there isn't one. Just because the technology doesn't instantly save humanity from all of its mistakes doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. Even research that never directly leads to a useful commercial application is helpful. Tons of advances have come sideways out of unrelated research. (Also, knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a choice many scientists make and there's nothing wrong with it.)
If you can't see past your own life, please get away from mine.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
We get at least one of these stories a week on /. A story about some wonderful new potential source of "Free" Green Energy. Of course none are anywhere near production and nobody sane even talks about them producing energy at costs per KWK anywhere near current technology. But as long as new miracle tech can be waved in front of folks the need to face up to our current reality can be postponed by wishful thinking.
Reality:
1. No "Alternate" Energy source is believed to be capable of producing a sizable fraction of our current energy needs at competitive rates in the next twenty years. Wind and solar are only popular in areas with massive government subsidy because they aren't cost effective on their own. And any attempt to scale either to carry large percentages of the grid will only make those issues clear and reveal more problems. Hydrogen is itself 'clean' but none of the sources are easy to tap in a clean way with one politically unacceptable (Nuke power) exception. Biofuels create egoboo for greens in small quantities but lead to famine when scaled up.
2. To obtain oil we are sending a large share of our wealth to people who are using it to destroy our civilization. This is a very bad idea.
3. The greens might have a point with the whole AGW thing. And even if their math and models are all wet it is likely we are having SOME effect somewhere with all this drilling, extracting and burning of fossil fuels.
4. Fusion has been thirty years off for the last forty years.
We really need to have a hard look at those realities, stop dreaming of a painless solution and start looking at options that might actually be able to help in the next twenty years.
Democrat delenda est
I'm wondering what would happen to compost heaps after some time with this bacteria. Will they be still useful for growing plants with them, or will they become "de-energized"?
"No blood for poop!"
This joke is 100% recycled via humor-digesting bacteria.
The enemies of Democracy are
The same thing that prevents house dogs from evolving back to wolves, and farm turkeys from evolving smaller breasts.
Ooooh. Interesting question! It binds iron and other metals, so that might make them more digestible, or less. Truely unclear.
According to the paper, "KN400 (the mutant strain) also had a greater propensity to form biofilms on glass or graphite than DL1 (the wild-type), even when growing with the soluble electron acceptor, fumarate." In a fuel-cell enviroment there would be significant survival advantages to forming a biofilm. In order to run its metabolic processes, this intriguing organism needs a terminal electron acceptor in its enviroment. Instead of bringing the acceptor inside (as we do with our terminal electron acceptor, oxygen), Geobacter uses its electrically conductive pili to send its electrons outside.
An electrode would really be the ideal living enviroment for this organism- it would act as a near-infinite sink for electrons. The mutant strain KN400 seems to be better adapted to living on an electrode, so within the constraints of a fuel-cell environment, the mutant strain should outcompete against the wild strain. In the organism's native enviroment, mud in a riverbed, I'd suspect the wild-type would be more successful, since it does not prefer to anchor itself in a biofilm. In mud, the organism would be better served on the move, making use of metal oxides as it finds them, rather than being tied to one spot and risking depletion (essentially asphyxiating).
However, in the fuel cell, selection pressure will favor organisms that stick to the electrodes, maximize electron conduction, and minimize internal resistance. Even without the "pushback" current used to drive adaptation of these characteristics, my guess is that the fitness advantages they provide will cause them to be passed on to future generations.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Some technical info and photos: http://www.geobacter.org/publications/19487117/
In the abstract for the actual journal article, they report the outputs for their mutant strain as current 7.6 amps per square meter and power 3.9 watts per square meter. Which is to say about 0.76mA per square centimeter, so not a gigantic number, but more impressive than what the parent predicts. One important factor that would make power generation using these microbes more attractive is that you could put them in a fuel cell that has a tremendous surface area to volume ratio.
Geobacter is an obligate anaerobe, so it does not require- indeed, cannot tolerate- access to the atmosphere, and it is not photosynthetic. You can buy carbon black, which makes a fine electrode, with a surface area to volume ratio of greater than 50 square meters per cubic centimeter. In the described experiment, they grew the bacterium on graphite, so carbon black should not pose an obstacle. A cubic meter of carbon black would have a surface area of about 50 square kilometers, but a mass of about 2 tons. An output of 3.9W/m^2 over 50 million square meters is 195 megawatts, which isn't shabby considering your input would be wastewater. Now, of course, that number is a wildly optimistic figure- good luck covering that much surface area with a bacterial biofilm- but it does suggest that you could produce enough power to say, make a wastewater treatment facility self-sufficient.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
They would be de-energized. But the nutrients would remain. Nutrients are the building blocks needed by photosynthetic organisms to build carbohydrates (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc). So de-energized compost piles would still be good places for plants to grow.
Devon