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MIT Researchers Harness Viruses To Split Water
ByronScott writes "A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy-intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. 'The team, led by Angela Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus called M13 so that it would attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins). The viruses became wire-like devices that could very efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules. Over time, however, the virus-wires would clump together and lose their effectiveness, so the researchers added an extra step: encapsulating them in a microgel matrix, so they maintained their uniform arrangement and kept their stability and efficiency.'"
I can just see it now. Some of these get dropped into an ocean, multiply, and eventually deconstruct the majority of the world's water into oxygen and hydrogen. It's the end of the world!!
The researchers had a real gas..
engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus
I am not a scientist, but isn't this how every zombie movie starts out? Today we get hydrogen fuel; tomorrow we get zombie outbreaks. At least we can use the fuel to escape, I guess.
Let's hope these don't spread into the ocean turning it into a toxic gas that will wipe out most life on earth...
Wrong apocalypse... Think of the exploding zombie movies!
It still takes energy to split the molecule, and it has to come from somewhere, even if viruses to the dirty work.
Despite the self-limiting nature of the technique they describe, whether it ends up working in production or not, I guarantee you that, in a matter of days, someone is going to be flogging a script around Hollywood studios about a runaway virus destroying all the water on earth and the team of hot, young scientists who save the day at the last possible minute by using something compounded from randomly selected Greek and Latin roots.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
from the sounds of it, without the proper conditions it will clump up and stop functioning. Still, caution would seem to be the best possible idea.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
They also need to find a way to transform the products of the reaction into usable hydrogen fuel – currently the hydrogen atoms are split into constituent protons and electrons that must be recombined into complete atoms and molecules.
What's up with this? Last time I checked, a naked proton will find an electron, combine into hydrogen and then form up with other hydrogen atoms into H2 spontaneously. Perhaps, they meant the hydrogen spontaneously recombines with the Oxygen released when water is split.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Press release stories like this should get a special Slashdot category - something like scientific vaporware. While this is potentially an important discovery, none of the information needed to determine if this could ever be an energetically or economically viable way of producing hydrogen is provided. I split water into hydrogen and oxygen every day when I run gels in my lab. The energy you could potentially get from the hydrogen that this electrolysis produces is smaller than the amount of energy it takes to run the gel. Basic research is cool and all (so cool it's what I do for a living), but without more data I would guess that this discovery is very much on the basic end of the basic-->applied research spectrum. Discoveries like this are made all the time - only a tiny fraction end up being useful in real life.
If the net effect is a positive for the virus, the behavior would have evolved on it's own in nature. If it's a negative, the virus will be out competed by other viruses. Even if it's neutral, it will at most fulfill its current niche and the water splitting abilities will be lost to genetic drift since it doesn't convey any advantage. In other words: Nothing is going to go wrong, control your irrational fears of genetic engineering and biotechnology.
The actual splitting of water is done by using a pigment to absorb sunlight, then transferring the energy to indium oxide as a catalyst to split water. That's old news. Good, but old.
The problem is that it's hard to keep them doing this efficiently; things tend to clump up. They came up with a way to use viruses to make a structure that keeps everything separate. Viruses are good for building self-assembling structures; this is also old news in nanotech.
Putting it all together here, that's news, but not terribly exciting news, since it's all still in a lab and not scaled to industrial sizes. So the PR department buffs it up with a misleading headline about viruses splitting water.
So no, you don't have to worry about the virus eating the world. It's all about indium oxide, which is not self-replicating. The viruses are just a piece of the machinery.
Before anyone more think this will split water molecules magically. It also requires a catalyst, so it will not spread by itself in the ocean.
Missing totally from the article, is any hard numbers about efficiency. Is it converting solar energy at 1%, 10%, 20% ? How is compared to PV-cells? If it is anywhere near, it could be very neat to get your solar energy as hydrogen instead of electricity. Hydrogen can be stored and converted to electricity when you need it.
Sure, except for this bit:
Over time, however, the virus-wires would clump together and lose their effectiveness, so the researchers added an extra step: encapsulating them in a microgel matrix, so they maintained their uniform arrangement and kept their stability and efficiency.
If this virus ever got loose it would no longer be inside the microgel matrix, so it would soon lose its efficiency at generating hydrogen, becoming just another virus among many—and one ill-adapted to survive outside a lab.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
In the article its says they split hydrogen into protons and electrons that need to be recombined into atoms and molecules..
Am I missing something basic about chemistry and physics or are the writers of the article just mucking up the information? Aren't they just splitting hydrogen from oxygen using H20 as the "fuel" and sun light as the energy?
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That's right. It's the scientist speak for zombies. Can't call it zombies, though, cuz they'd get sued by the Hollywood IP zombies.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Some important information is missing from the summary. The viruses don't do the splitting. They profide a scaffold for the synthetic catalyst (iridium oxyde here) which catalyzes dissociation of water by sunlight. So this is a form of solar energy using a clever catalytic nanomaterial, not some mysterious virus-based energy as the summary makes it sound.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
Virus multiplies, converts *all* water on the Earth into a hydrogen ... All life on the Earth disappeared except for the hydrogen-powered vehicles which evolve into intelligent beings.
Am I missing something, or wouldn't this be a huge benefit to the existing process of extracting drinkable water from sea water? One of the major problems with the current process is the energy costs. If this is a low energy way to separate the hydrogen and oxygen, it would be easy to filter and much less energy intensive to recombine.
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Great for leading your people to freedom from Nanopharaoh.
They're basically doing a form of artificial photosynthesis.
Apparently, the viruses will have to clean up the mess as well. Title of the TFA: MIT researchers harness viruses to spilt water.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
If the net effect is a positive for the virus, the behavior would have evolved on it's own in nature.
Evolution does not guarantee that any given mutation will occur.
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I can remember an episode of In Search of... that showed a room-temperature form of liquid H that would replace gasoline with only a $35 modification to the carburetor.
Impossible. You need energy input to split water. No amount of catalysts can help you - first law of thermodynamics comes to rescue, as usual.
Since the viruses use sunlight to convert water, all we would need to do is to stay in a dark room.
A large tin foil hat can also be used.
A GAS evolving VIRUS is created by the GERMeshausen Professor of Materials Science who's last name is BELCHER! Shouldn't this be an April 1 post?
Regardless of the efficiency of this method, the hydrogen economy is still vaporware.
Hydrogen remains an energy transport, or store, not a source. You can't yet store enough practically to make a useful road vehicle. You lose energy manufacturing it electrically. You lose energy converting it back to electricity.
The current largest source of hydrogen? Oil. I'm sure you can wring it out of coal as well. The fossil fuel lobby love hydrogen technologies because they are the biggest source of hydrogen.
Solve the energy crisis? A practical fusion reactor and better electricity storage. Then we can get working on the molecular manufacturing and fix the environment back up.
I hear if you change the covalent bond angle of water to 120 degrees, it cures cancer !
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
1. it's not self-catalyzing, it takes iridium oxide which is what you might call highly uncommon (though they implied there might be others, but if they needed to start with Ir02 the list must have been very very short)
2. they didn't say under what conditions it reproduces, but i wouldn't be surprised if the open ocean isn't its best culture medium, or even a decent one
3. in order to get it to work for any sort of duration they had to encase the virus in a gel. now, unless they plan to mutate the virus to produce its own gel, or not to need the gel, it's not going to threaten very much of any body of water
4. we could use a little more oxygen, as ours is being bound up into CO2 by people who persist in believing that burning coal & oil is a god-given right
I've never heard something like this, is it half alive?
They mean a virus that typically infects bacteria.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
ATTN: All people including parent who don't understand how long and with how much effort a virus needs to effectively cross barriers between species of hosts (let alone viruses like these that affect prokaryotic bacteria jumping to fucking eukaryotic animals! Are you kidding me?)
Please STFU. You paranoia is sourced in horror movies and cheap sci-fi novellas. Go read about real microbiology. Thanks.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I am sorry this is not the full story. It requires a large amount of energy to seperate Hydrogen and Oxygen in water molecules. You get that energy back when you burn them together and get water. But you have to input energy in there somewhere. It is thermodynamics.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
The human body has no thermal energy? Ahh... thats why I have to lay in the sun to get my body temp up to ~98 F (~36C).
Yeah... how could the virus ever find more iridium oxide while floating around in the world's oceans?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
You don't need a virus to do that... just a match.
... this still seems like a pretty trivial problem to solve. I would imagine that the vast majority of these free protons would more-or-less immediately hook up with a passing water molecule to form a hydronium ion. Put a pair of electrodes in the water, run a small amount of current through it. The H3O+ ions will be attracted to the negative pole, start soaking up electrons, and... instant hydrogen, right? And the amount of electricity required would be way less than straight up electrolysis, since the only bond you would need to break would be the loose connection between the spare proton and the water molecule.
The really interesting question, though... is this process EVER going to be able to beat regular old electrolysis in terms of cost-effectiveness? Indium don't come cheap.
Now the second law comes to the rescue - you need temperature gradients to extract energy.
Then they should make a variant of the virus that splits C02.
I didn't know that was a bacterial virus, I thought it was a plant. Who knew? Wow!
It infects bacteria.
Like a canine virus infects dogs.
How is this informative? Where's the car analogy?
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
It is self limiting.
If you can't keep the hydrogen and oxygen separated they will just reform as water again perhaps killing the virus in the process.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
In Soviet Russia Viruses Harness MIT Researchers To Split Water.
I don't know why, I must be really sleepy to go for the old 'Soviet Russia' gig and not with a better suitable naked and petrified Natalie Portman is pouring hot water splitting Viruses down MIT Researchers Pants.
Oh .... this is bad.
You can't handle the truth.
“Unlikely”? That’s quite an understatement.
For personal reasons I highly suspect that natural photosynthesis is pretty damn efficient, and I doubt that they’ll ever get anything similar that is 10 times more efficient than natural photosynthesis. Okay, if you scale it up 10 times larger then you can get 10 times the yield, but 10 times more efficient on the same scale? I don’t think they’ll ever achieve that. But... who knows? Maybe there’s a good reason for natural photosynthesis not to be the most efficient method possible.
Anyway, yes, this could be a key piece of the overall puzzle of getting cheaper, more efficient utilization of solar energy.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Yea they are called plants.
Neutrons are slippery little rascals, they can fool you. They can bounce and show up around corners you don't expect.
Yes I am being an ass. I'm just tired of the paranoia getting rolled out every time somebody suggests a biotech solution to a problem, as though viruses are going to jump between entire taxonomic KINGDOMS overnight and kill us all (which I believe was implied even if it was not stated). It's just bullshit, and no, it couldn't happen, in so far as it has never been observed to happen, never even been reasonably theorized to happen. Insofar as we as human beings don't know everything, it's not demonstrated impossible, but from everything we do know, no, it just couldn't happen.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Am I the only one that whenever they hear of these types of technology (virus batteries, gmo food, virus water molecule splitting), gets the Devo song Mongoloid streaming to their brain????!!!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Think about it... the mythology of things like the Loch Ness monster and fire breathing dragons could be true. If some animal had developed a means of harnessing this sort of a virus to split water into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for FIRE, you could have both in one!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Please STFU. You paranoia is sourced in horror movies and cheap sci-fi novellas. Go read about real microbiology. Thanks.
There's a reason that they're modded up as "funny". :)
Or... at least... the ones that aren't should be.
Heh. "Prokaryotic" and "eukaryotic" are not monophyletic categories, and need to be dropped. See the research of Norm Pace, for example.
The hydrogen generating virus was engineered by Angela Belcher. Who writes this stuff?
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make install -not war
We don't need a virus for that. We have cyanobacteria, which have been producing oxygen via photosynthesis for 2.8 billion years or so. Plants can do it too, but cyanobacteria are small, ubiquitous and efficient, just like your hypothetical virus.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Some other world where the oceans are full of the indium catalyst necessary for this process to work might be threatened, not ours.
Which means this is a weapons programme! So it's certain to receive way more funding than it needs.
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make install -not war
Sound's like next week's SyFy movie of the week
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
But in this case, the H2 + O2 would combine in a controlled device designed to extract the maximum energy for directed use. Water + power. From sunlight, which is nearly all they have in the places that most need cheap water and power.
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make install -not war
no, it couldn't happen
When the known viruses were limited to the various influenza strains and the mostly defeated childhood diseases it wasn't such a big deal. Now that HIV is mainstream and Ebola is well known, and there was semi-constant coverage about H1N1 and it's potential for mutation to a more lethal form... well yeah there is a fear factor happening here.
Do you really think it's completely unjustified?
Perhaps they could use light as the energy source required. You could even make sugar with it! But you'd need to collect the sunlight - since red and blue are the highest-energy colors, it would need to be a green pigment.
If only such a thing existed...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
They won't recombine into water without an ignition source.
The processing doesn't have to stop with hydrogen as the fuel. The hydrogen can be converted into other chemicals with only a small energy cost. I prefer propane or "natural gas" (mostly methane), which burn very cleanly, especially in fuelcells, that already get over 40% efficiency (plus usable byproduct heat). There is already an extensive gas energy infrastructure, which we should grown to be universally available (perhaps with "last mile" as mostly electric to areas hard to pipe).
Cheap, networked fusion reactors and efficient energy storage are also very important. In fact they fit in well with propane fuelcells, since both the fuelcell and the fusion reactor might use hydrogen as the storage medium for energy at small and large scales, respectively.
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make install -not war
we could use a little more oxygen, as ours is being bound up into CO2 by people who persist in believing that burning coal & oil is a god-given right
Those people suffer from hubrus, a condition that supporters of this type of experimentation also frequently suffer.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
If you've made it this far down, you've waded through a river of bullshit. From the half-cocked fear mongering Luddites, past the post-intellectuals joking about doomsday, over the no-news-is-new crowd that already knew about this, to the same old arguments we have about oil and alternative energy.
So congrats, you owe yourself a beer. Now get back to work.
Even one molecule at a time, it takes energy to split H2O in to 2Hs and an O. Even if the viruses make the reaction as perfectly efficient as possible, there's no free lunch and it will be impossible to split the water for any less cost in energy than one can obtain by re-introducing the H and O.
So let me guess, you think chicken pox comes from chickens? Here's a hint: it doesn't. As for bird flu, it took twenty. muthafuckin'. years. for it to cross from birds to humans in any appreciable numbers. That's my point, not that it doesn't happen, but it takes a LONG TIME. Swine flu took more than a decade.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
This is in fact, precisely one of the bigger challenges with Hydrogen as an energy storage/delivery medium. It's not so easy to store it, or pipe it over long distances. Its molecules are so tiny that they diffuse through almost anything, leaking out and embrittling the tank or pipe in the process.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
Pacific coastal water was 1.02 +/- 0.26 x 10(-14) g
Source: PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18964014
That's "iridium is about as rare as chicken lips in sea water."
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BMO
I'm no big tree hugger, but as an animal I have come to form an emotional relationship with the earth and I would prefer that while, we recognize that changes to come to the environment and biosphere, that, we not go around pissing on things all over the place either. Like, I don't think its entirely wrong to ask people to respect the world they live in. Like, I never understood how my fellow right wingers could be so up and up on God, and not ponder for a moment that the earth should be respected because it is His gift to us. I would expect them to be leading the charge on the environment, not dragging their feet on it.
This is my sig.
most of the biotech stories here on /. are academic demo projects - they got it to work, and maybe, one day, it might lead to something, but at the moment the probabilit that an virus based system of any sort is going to split water seems..ludicrous.
And most of hte biotech stuff on /. is like that, like all the lab on a chip diagnose you physiology from a drop of blood stuff, all the nanobots go into your bloodstream and heal you stuff, all the gene therapy/RNAi/antisense stuff, all the stem cell stuff...all of this stuff is years and years away from doing any good (except in the case of RNAi, which may actually help a small number of people soon)
You want real cutting edge progress in biotech....
look at artificial eyes and other organs
DNA sequencing; there was a paper in science magazine last year about how, ifyou had a mix of DNA from 10,000 random people, and DNA from a suspect, you could tell if the suspects DNA was in teh mix
as though viruses are going to jump between entire taxonomic KINGDOMS overnight
Be serious. Nobody's suggesting that.
It'd take millions, maybe billions of generations to evolve to that extent.
So not overnight, but possibly by next Thursday.
Sorry, I am all for science.
But certain experiments should be conducted OFF-PLANET (see President Obama, who just castrated space program).
Yes, yes, we always know that protections have been taken to ensure the safety and contain said virus. Yes, yes, they always say that....
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But seriously, humans are 70% water. A virus that breaks down water is just asking for the end of humanity.
ATTN: You paranoia is sourced in horror movies and cheap sci-fi novellas. Go read about real microbiology. Thanks.
And sarcasm... You forgot to include sarcasm, the chief source of our oh so authentic paranoia.
Indeed not. There are plenty of positive genetic traits that would have had no impetus to occur naturally, because as you so helpfully pointed out, traits that are neutral in the short term may very well be lost to genetic drift, even if in the long run they could accumulate to something more beneficial.
Yeah taking shit out of context doesn't work with an apostate Christian who was forced to study the Bible five+ days a week, nine months a year every year for nine years.
It depends on which Christianity we're talking about. Christians tend to get lumped together but the reality is that a lot of the Christian sects have very different beliefs. Indeed, some versions of Christianity have you getting into heaven so long as you just "accept Christ" and others have you getting into heaven only if you do good deeds to match your faith in Christ. And some versions of Christianity don't have you getting into heaven at all, with only a few actually being saved.
So.. when you say that someone is taking a quote in the bible out of context, be careful, because it really means you are saying that they are not speaking that verse in your context. After all, some Christian faiths would say that the Bible is not even a literal word of God, but, man's attempt to transcribe his relationship with the almighty and that actually an oral tradition of Christian storytelling is far, far more important than just reading the book by itself.
This is my sig.
Let me see if I'm reading this right. They're using iridium oxide as a catalyst? The same element that's found in high concentrations in asteroids, but found virtually nowhere on Earth? (except at the K-T boundary, apparently.) Methinks it'll take quite a bit more energy to assemble the electrolizer than it'll eventually produce. The Second Law of Thermodynamics frowns upon your shenanigans.
AWESOME!!!!!
(This all is written with the admittedly ethnocentric assumptions that you are a nonnative American citizen, and are most likely of European descent. If I'm mistaken, please disregard, the rest of this won't make much sense.)
So when you and yours go extinct, everyone around you should just buck-up too, right? By way of analogy, the dying-off of North American Native civilizations, such as the Mound-Builders, resulted in the Spaniards et. al. arriving to find a culture that had devolved back to being, for want of a more generous term, neolithic. If this event had not happened, (c. 900-1300 C.E.) Christophoro Columbo and his crew would have found a civilization of complexity and organization to rival the best of Europe at it's peak to that date, and of vicious blood-lust to rival that of ancient Rome. The steam-rolling of the "Indians" by Europeans might never have occurred, even given the natives' lack of biological resistance; with a large enough initial populous at time of first transatlantic contact, a pool of survivors of all the plagues and pox the Europeans had would have ensured the survival of their nation(s), albeit depleted, of course.
If you're not a Native American descendant, and you live in America, (which you might well be, and do,) you owe the civilization you enjoy now, to the ease with which your ancestors were able to tear it from the hands of those who had it first. You owe the civilization you enjoy to the mass die-off of the Native Americans in the 500 years before Europe's forcible penetration of the 'New World'. By an extension of your logic, if THAT was a good thing, then when you and yours all suddenly drop dead, that will be a good thing, from the perspective of whomever takes over what is now "yours".
So please continue sanguinely enjoying the fruits of your (and your ancestors') dumb-luck, remembering that just because a massive upheaval resulted in the beautiful blue-green orb we live on today, doesn't mean that we will enjoy the next massive upheaval, in fact, it will probably be rather unpleasant. Hastening it, if indeed we are, when in fact we needn't, is downright stupid.
"... since red and blue are the highest-energy colors ..."
Erm, blue and green are higher energy than red. (look at a rainbow, red is at one end and blue at the other with green somewhere in the middle (ROYGBIV)).
America, Home of the Brave.
Catalysts can greatly reduce the activation energy needed for a reaction.
America, Home of the Brave.
"Every time you drink cold water or hot coffee, there is a transfer of heat - and that is just blatant heat energy."
Calculate its amount. It's trivial compared to amount of chemical energy.
For example, suppose that cup of coffee (0.25l) is at 70C and your body is at 40C. So you can extract at most 0.25*4200*(70-40)~=30000J of energy. That's enough to split 0.1 moles of water (about 1.8 grams). And that's in the ideal case.
Actually, any given mutation very likely does occur, in any sufficiently large population . . . the problem is whether the creature will survive any nontrivial mutation. That's what's rare.
Nonaggression works!
Yes, true and very useful, but you still don't get to defeat the Second Law. You can't transfer the atoms into a higher energy state without that energy coming from somewhere (in this case, apparently sunlight).
Nonaggression works!
While this situation doesn't seem quite the same, assuming that a virus or disease can't cross species isn't always a safe gamble. For example, see "mad cow disease", which crosses to humans, and is thought to have crossed to cows via their ingestion of proteins created from the ground remains of other animals. It may be a variant of scabies (from sheep).
But in that system the hydrogen isn't liberated, meaning you can't make money selling the free energy.
So it'll never be developed beyond the concept phase.
Sorry.
That is per gram of seawater... 1 gr of seawater being roughly 1 cc of seawater. So a cubic meter of seawater contains 10(9) * 10(-14) = 10(-5) gr. and 100 m3 of seawater contains a milligram of iridium... that's a cube only a few meters on a side. How many virus particles can be made functional with a mg of iridium? Sounds to me like with a whole ocean to feed on there could be quite a large number of virus particles activated. So the answer to "Where would the iridium come form?" is - seawater.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop