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Teen's Biofuel Invention Turns Algae Into Fuel

Posted by samzenpus on from the muck-in-the-truck dept.

Lasrick writes "Evie Sobczak won a trip to Jet Propulsion Lab for her biofuel invention: 'For a fifth-grade science fair, Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick. In seventh grade, she generated power by engineering paddles that could harness wind. And in eighth grade, she started a project that eventually would become her passion: She wanted to grow algae and turn it into biofuel.'"

7 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 3, Insightful

    to be a significant power sources without either destroying foodcrops or natural ecologicies, or get more than about 5% efficiency - less than a solar panel.

    Makes for a cute story though, as do all these biofuel stories. Keeps everyone hopeful, despite the complete silliness.

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    1. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Look, kid. I'm not trying to discourage this young woman. I *do* get irritated at repetitive, innumerate media stories which appear to be designed to quell a gullible populace rather than inform anyone about just what kind of an energy-deficit shitstorm is coming down in the pike at a much more rapid clip than I expected.

      Don't you DARE presume that your limits are future generations' as well.
      I'm pretty sure the laws of physics won't change in the medium term. :) There are answers, by the way. Thorium nuclear plus increased battery efficiency, or even just better batteries alone have at least a chance of saving our collective bacon long enough to get to sustainable fusion power. There's not much else on the horizon though. Seriously, most of the popsci junk regarding new energy breakthroughs is just that - junk.

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    2. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You, sir, are an ass.

      Algae can be grown in a desert, using raw sewage as input. Zero farmland is used up.

      Also, deserts can be filled with solar power to molten salt plants, a proven technology that generates electricity 24 hours a day.

    3. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 1, Insightful

      But at least I have some education and can think things through. Did it occur to you that desert ecologies are worth preserving too? To think of them as wastelands suited only for humans is rather impressive arrogance.

      Yes, you can use solar power to store the heat in salt. It's spiffy. It's great for local, small scale applications if you have the money. There's not enough desert to make it a practical alternative to current industrial scale power generation. Line losses getting it from point A to point B make it not worth doing on a large scale unless you live near, or in the desert (That said, this would work in the Sahel where power needs are smaller if you could get the money to build the plants in the first place)

      Just go talk to an electrical engineer with time. You'll embarrass yourself less.

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  2. Re:LOL by SirGarlon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think all that means is she knows more about science than the local-newspaper reporter who wrote TFA.

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  3. Crap article. by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And by that, I mean both the Tamba Bay and the Slashdot article. There is nothing anywhere about how she got the biodiesel from algae, which at this point is the only interesting thing about the experiment. It mentions photoautotrophic cultivation, which just means that the algae use light to grow, which is a big no-shit-Sherlock. It mentions osmotic sonication, which is a fancy word for using sound waves and osmotic principles to get the detergent into the cell innards. Google searches turn up no indication of how the experiment was set up, what the actual results or anything of interest. The best thing I got was a list of who else won what other categories at the fair.

    So we have two utterly known principles being applied to biodiesel generation from algae, and somehow this makes news as a breakthrough. Yawn.

    Which leads me to my second rant: the insistence of news organizations to hail science fair winners as geniuses who solved a problem no one else could (I'm specifically looking at the stories about the kid arranging solar cells in a tree shape). It completely oversells the experiment, turns the kid into something they're not, and covers up the actual interesting item: that you can do cool science in your home that goes beyond baking powder volcanoes. It could even be science that is relevant to an existing topic of interest to actual scientists, which should put the kids on a good trajectory to actually solving the problem. But no, instead we are presented with kid geniuses who solve world hunger, and I get to fend off all kinds of dumb questions and comments about science, the state of technology and why we're not listening more to kids.

    Now get off my lawn.

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  4. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In 5th grade, she figured out something obvious. In 7th grade, she figured out another something obvious. In 8th grade, she started thinking about something non-obvious, spent 4 years developing it and then used it to win an internationally renowned competition sponsored by Intel. The importance of the 5th/7th grade anecdotes is that interest and achievement in science isn't an immediate phenomenon...it has to be cultivated from an early age if you want to see results by high school or college.