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Fuel Cells From Nanomaterials Made From Human Urine
New submitter turning in circles (2882659) writes 'Carbon based fuel cells require carbon doped with other elements, normally platinum, for oxygen reduction reactions. Urine contains carbon with an exciting splash of nitrogen, sulfur, potassium, silicon, and so on, and you don't have to manufacture it: the stuff just comes out by itself. In an article published this week in an open journal, researchers from Korea reported a new nanomaterial for fuel cells, which they dub "Urine Carbon." Upon drying, and then heating at 1000C, and rinsing of salts, the resulting Urine Carbon porous nanostructures outperformed Carbon/platinum in electrodes.'
I'm sure you can get some kind of medical treatment for that
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
That settles it, time to piss in someone's gas tank.
Time to offend someone
Now there's a renewable energy source.
I can see bars having a "pee here for the environment" campaign.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
With enough energy, you can convert water, urine, or almost any common chemical into a fuel cell and make the headlines. However, that does not make it practical. There are always the problems of efficiency, scalability, portability, and sometimes availability (as in the case of urine and bacteria). In other words, don't pee in your gas tank any time soon.
So the material is made porous by heating and removing salt particles. Nice! There can't be much material left after drying though, I'm curious how much the energy density of said yield would be. I did spin through the paper, I noticed the 300-400mg/L yield but not the energy density, did anyone else catch it amongst the jargon?
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
Sure! Give the machines some more incentive ..
...the challenger, Urea from Korea!
Well, the Waterless No Flush Urinals will make the perfect collection device! At least as long as they can keep the idiots from throwing their cigarette butts in them! Just connect the plumbing to a collection tank instead of the sanitary sewer system!
namely, a lovely line from Tom Clancy concerning a black helicopter pilot where he shouldn't be without enough fuel to scat... "Son, right now I'd burn piss if I had enough."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Well, if ((age < 2) || (age > 65))
sig: sauer
There's that potassium, and phosphorus.. Both are major elements used in fertilizers for industrial agriculture, i.e. we rely on them for cheap and abundant food. So collecting and harvesting piss could become very important.
But I'm not so sure we want to be around for number two...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
This is valuable stuff, now that it has a market use. And to think that I wrote it off as waste and was just pissing it away.
to patent my urine.
I recall reading a recipe for case-hardening iron in a Scientfic American article from 1890's. The process involved packing a crucible with iron, straw, and horse feces and urine, then heating in a furnace.
I guess these ingredients were readily available to black smiths of the time.
How do you accelerate the development of fuel cells as much as humanly possible? Turn it into a pissing contest!
Ezekiel 23:20
North Korea just wants to see the rest of the world spend hours in the lab trying to replace platinum with pee. They're probably laughing their butts off right now.
On a more serious note, how stable is their new fuel cell? If the electrodes need to be replaced frequently, then it won't really be any improvement. The linked article claims the electrodes are more durable, but I'd like to see someone corroborate that. This may be difficult to replicate because they used human urine, the composition of which can change drastically based on diet.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I would think this would work better for deflector shields than the moon swirls in the next article, but maybe the "swirlies" are related.
...seriously.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
I'd say "pissash" rolls of the tongue easier than "urine carbon," but the metaphor is too disgusting.
There's just no way this research is not winning an IgNobel Prize. It fits the ethos: first it makes you laugh, then it makes you think.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
This has been done before. In the 70s there was a blues band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
There is very marginal amount of energy left in urine, that's why the body discards it as waste. And in that, It's simply too complicated to turn nitrogenous materials into molecular nitrogen and exhale them through your lungs, plus organisms doing it are not that ecologically friendly because most ecosystems suffer from a lack of fixed nitrogen. So you create water soluble urea H2N-CO-NH2(or ammonia for some creatures) out of it, and piss it out. Let the bacteria, plants, etc, recycle it into proteins you can eat again. That's urine. It's the best fertilizer ever, other than it's too soluble and the nitrogen runs away with the rain as runoff. Unless you have good black soil with a lot of ion exchange capacity to bind it and not let it run off into the river and the ocean, from which fungi that penetrate the soil throughout can get it and teleport it all over the place where a plant, like a tree, needs it. You don't see much of these fungi except at breeding time, they stick their reproductive orgams above the ground, called mushrooms, and there is a million variety in them, some toxic cuz they got friggin tired of always being eaten. It's like you're about to fuck and you whip out your dick and some piranha flies by and bites it off. So those people with poisonous dicks killing piranhas that bite them off would have a natural selection pressure to make it to tomorrow. Fungi are the top chemists of nature, when it comes to drugs, or recycling waste and getting the last drops of energy out of them, they can digest even cellulose in the cold and some termites farm them for it. But most fungi out in forests live symbiotically with other plants, and some fungi, like morel mushrooms, there is word that only some kinds of trees are able to feed them properly in exchange for the minerals, water and nutrients they bring to the roots from miles away.