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Mussels With Hydrogen Fuel Cells Found
greenrainbow writes "According to scientists, there are mussels at the bottom of the ocean that are efficiently converting hydrogen into energy in their very own, nature-made hydrogen fuel cells (abstract). The mussels were found near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor and have onboard symbiotic bacteria that convert hydrogen into energy. With this discovery, researchers might be able to clone the hydrogen eating bacteria to create all-natural hydrogen fuel cells to power things other than sea life."
Jeez, we already know how to do hydrogen fuel cells. Come on nature, give us some info we can USE for once.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
for the new generation of mussel cars.
My giant squid shaped, world cruising, shipping menace of a submersible is one step closer to fruition!
Ya I bet the Starfish can do fusion. I mean why else would anyone call it a starfish?
To summarize their results with a little more rigor; these deep sea organisms use hydrogen as an electron donor for the fixation of carbon (in the form of dissolved bicarbonate). There is little to suggest at this moment that the scientists have a ready method for using these enzymes to produce electric flow. For example, we have known the complete cycle of electrons in photosynthesis yet no solar panels are enzyme based. So I would be cautious of using the term 'fuel cell' which implies the production of electricity.
Please note that the scientists themselves never made the claim that the clams had a 'hydrogen fuel cell' and the discovery of an organism that uses hydrogen gas as an electron donor is a significant one.
The real tricks with the hydrogen fuel cells are getting a reliable source of hydrogen with a low energy input (it's almost always found in compound with other elements) and storing it at high enough volumes to be really useful without using high pressures or exotic, expensive materials.
I rather prefer the cellulose to biodiesel bacteria, algae, and fungi that are being researched. It seems to be a more useful fuel, and cellulose seems a lot more readily available than loose hydrogen. Biobutanol from cellulose is being researched in Japan, and butanol is a fairly straightforward replacement for at least part of a diesel's fuel. There's a fungus found in a rainforest that converts sugar or cellulose into a number of hydrocarbons and can be urged to make more based on exposure to antibiotic compounds. There's talk of work to genetically engineer something to do this, which likely would be a bacterium like e. coli engineered to produce the same compounds from the same feedstocks. In fact, e. coli is already being used in research to convert cellulose into diesel and kerosene.
If you thought that American and Chinese universities were the only ones who pump up their press releases with nonsense to attract more attention, the Max Planck Gesselschaft offers up evidence to the contrary.
The real news here: they've discovered a novel mechanism for chemosynthesis, which is how organisms can make energy from chemicals rather than photosynthesis. It's already been observed with other hydrogen compounds like hydrogen sulfide and methane, but it hadn't been observed for pure hydrogen until now.
It's probably not useful for powering cars. There's nothing surprising or novel about the ability to extract energy from pure hydrogen or hydrogen compounds; it's surprising and novel that you can power a living organism that way. The hard part has always been obtaining and transporting high-energy hydrogen compounds in the first place (though fuel cells can always use some improvement).
Of course you never know what insights are going to come from any novel mechanism you discover, but the article doesn't go into applications and there's no reason to imagine it would be good for cars. The keyword for this study is microbiology, not engineering, and that's is just a way to try to make it sound more immediately applicable than it is.
I suppose it's asking too much for press release writers to stick to the actual facts, which are interesting enough in this case, rather than unfounded speculation.
Bacteria that do hydrogen oxidation as a method for driving their metabolism have been known for decades. The novel thing in this paper is that they've found a symbiont, where a eukaryote (in this case a mussel) coexists with hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria, whereas previously the known hydrothermal vent symbionts contained bacteria with sulfur-based compounds or methane metabolic cycles. Unfortunately there appears to be nothing new about hydrogen metabolism, and nothing particularly useful for humans who want to harness hydrogen metabolism, in this.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.