However, giving the bacteria a small assist with a tiny amount of electricity -- about 0.25 volts or a small fraction of the voltage needed to run a typical 6 volt cell phone -- they can leap over the fermentation barrier and convert a "dead end" fermentation product, acetic acid, into carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
Logan notes, "Basically, we use the same microbial fuel cell we developed to clean wastewater and produce electricity. However, to produce hydrogen, we keep oxygen out of the MFC and add a small amount of power into the system."
In the new MFC, when the bacteria eat biomass, they transfer electrons to an anode. The bacteria also release protons, hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons, which go into solution. The electrons on the anode migrate via a wire to the cathode, the other electrode in the fuel cell, where they are electrochemically assisted to combine with the protons and produce hydrogen gas.
A voltage in the range of 0.25 volts or more is applied to the circuit by connecting the positive pole of a programmable power supply to the anode and the negative pole to the cathode.
The researchers call their hydrogen-producing MFC a BioElectrochemically-Assisted Microbial Reactor or BEAMR. The BEAMR not only produces hydrogen but simultaneously cleans the wastewater used as its feedstock. It uses about one-tenth of the voltage needed for electrolysis, the process that uses electricity to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen.
Logan adds, "This new process demonstrates, for the first time, that there is real potential to capture hydrogen for fuel from renewable sources for clean transportation."
Basically, this is saying that.25V starts the process going, and that further research will show how many can be produced/costs/etc.
Other than recreational uses, what else could this be used for? Telescope cameras pop to mind for space imagery capture. I think current systems use very high-resolution cameras, though anything that drives down prices would drive up quality.
Has someone applied Moore's law to digital camera pixel amount?
I'm continually suprised at how many people are jumping on the.torrent and eMule bandwagon. Over Thanksgiving, my mother (not a techno-elite) told me that she had a secret... and was pirating Audio Books off the internet using such tools. It completely blew my mind that my mom though of herself as a "hacker" and loved the idea.
What ever happened to the days when my family couldn't even understand the basics of web pages? I guess that when the tools are so incredibly useful, and so easy to install/operate, it quickly becomes a prevalent technology.
I joined the Air Force as an officer 6 years ago, and just left a few months ago. When I originally went to Carnegie Mellon University, I took multiple classes in Virtual Reality. Unfortunately, the AF would not allow me to take the time off to pursue a Masters in Virtual Reality there... as they needed my computer skills immediately.
I guess I was just 4 years early... those skills are in very high demand, now.
Anyone catch the Shrek 2 scene where the city is being assaulted and the wave of citizens runs screaming from one StarBucks across the street to another?
Rather than listen to the same 20 current "top hit" songs play for approximately 120 times each, I loaded all of the Douglas Adams audio books onto my trusty Creative Nomad 60 gig player (hey, why support the iPod -- every cent goes to the enemy! Viva la Microsoft!)
It was the most enjoyable trip I've ever taken. I had no road rage, I smiled, I laughed, I cried. Those are great books, and I can't wait to hear them all remade again.
If you have to drive/train/bike/job/skydive to work, you might try some audio books... they really take the edge off.
When I was a Freshman at CMU, I worked on a research programming project translating a bunch of the Navigation code for this self-driving HMMWV ("Hum vee"). It was originally written in C, and we converted it to Ada... though I bet it's been reverted back to a more versatile language.
It used multiple cameras mounted at different heights to build a 3D view of it's surroundings, and could judge all kinds of obstacles... though at the time (7 years ago) had a lot of trouble with streams and shadows. I was amazed that it could recognize stoplights correctly, and even signaled when it was changing lanes on a street.
Either way, it was a great project for a young would-be programmer to work on, very amazing stuff, and lots of cool toys to see in the Robotics Institute there.
I received my BS from CMU. Rather than paying for it myself, I took an Air Force ROTC scholarship and begame an officer in the military.
In the past five years since joining te AF, I've personally managed over 10 million dollars of equipment/programing budgets. I'm set up networks and portals across multi-level security systems within the Pentagon. I've done stuff my CS/ECE friends have never dreamed of... mainly because of my excellent CMU education.
I'm currently transitioning out of the Air Force into a consultant job. Just mentioning that I went to CMU has probably added a $5-$10k bonus to my starting salary.
I agree that CMU has an... interesting social environment. I'm as interested in working with humans as with networks, so I might have solved the problem differently than others.
I joined an eclectic fraternity, and had an amazing time. (Many) Fraternities at CMU are different then other schools -- everyone in is a nerd in some sense. Everyone is extremely passionate and/or intelligent. There were parties every weekend, and usually small hang-out parties every night. You will date heavily, both within CMU and to other close-by universities... if you are interested in that.
There is a high male:female ratio, but that's tempered by the fact that most of the males there don't want to date females (or any human, for that matter).
If you love to work hard and play hard, that's an excellent place to be.
Advertiser's Dream
on
GPS Drawings
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
How much time do you spend per year driving a less than optimal route (or just plain lost)? I figure I spend about 60 hours a year driving more than I need to (damn, I didn't know there was a detour there -- or, I shoulda took the bypass around that traffic jam).
Calculate:
(hrs wasted driving/year) * [(# of people who care) * (average value of hour per person)
+ (amount of wear and tear on road) + (amount of wear and tear on car) + (amount of wasted gas) + (cost of polution in air) + (money saved from less accidents)]
Using GPS systems when driving quickly add up some serious savings! Image if the Government paid 50% off all GPSes -- they'd quickly recoup their costs in terms of road/polution/life savings!
If that's not enough, would you sell your GPS coordinates and a detailed buying profile? Advertisers would be able to say -- "80% of people driving this road are interested in their MCSE certfification!", or "30% of people that go down this highway at 5 PM have children in the perfect X-Box purchasing range!", etc... Then, put some animated signs that change based on who's driving by.... we're talking serious advertising $$$!
You could use the same info for tracking speed limits & dangerous roads. I'm not talking tracking when people are speeding, but rather, track when people are speeding stupidly. Imagine if all speed limits in the world were variable, depending on the weather, the amount of accidents occuring in this area, the average age (or skill) of drivers on that road, etc. Wow. I currently live in Germany and drive 100MPH on average -- I hate going back to the states and driving 55. But, German drivers are much more skilled (5 months mandatory driver's training, no exceptions), and have on average much safer and more responsive cars...
Bottom line: Everyone should use GPS systems, and the government should be handing them out like candy. Get some intelligent privacy laws going, and It'd be an improvement for everyone!
I use Excite as my portal, and when you click on the "My Reminders" title, it will take you to an online calendar/contacts list. Search around, and there's a link to TrueSync there.
TrueSync will also synch with my Outlook, my Palm, my iPaq and my Motorola Timeport cell phone. Now, I update one, and everything's immediately updated (also great for synching my work and home calendars with my iPaq).
Star Wars Galaxies is planning on coming online next year. Of course -- images of light sabers and blasters quickly call up visions of another "Hack n Slash" online adventure world. Lucky for us, it looks like the developers are going to offer some alternatives.
What makes this game different is (along with the developers actually polling users about their preferences and building them into the game) the amount of attention they are paying to non-gamers. Current discussion threads have centered around making the universe more interesting to females (who typically are a bit more mature and tire of the repetitive womp-rat hunting to gain experience), and others who want a more robust universe to navigate.
There are entire skill trees and abilities planned for dancing, weaving, makeovers (hair coloration/clothing disguise), house building/layout, mining, merchant abilites (owning a store, trading stocks, industrial espionage), politics (mayor of your city/county/planets/galaxy), etc.
As soon as these games hit a certain critical mass, they'll start defining the future of the Net -- where users can move, and dance, and react, and display realistic facial animations. I'm hooked already.
How much battery life does this thing have? After PDAing around the world for a couple months, batterly life is foremost on my mind.
I have an iPAQ with a PCMCIA card slot, sometimes hooked to a AirCard card (sweet wireless 128k download speeds in a taxi!), and sometimes to a Cisco Aironet wireless LAN card. We recently demoed this working through a Tachyon 1.5 meter dish satelite connection, routed to a wireless base station. I was streaming MP3s to a cow farm in Germany. Amazing applications, but one Achilies heel...
The problem: Power. My battery (even with the extra battery in the PCMCIA sleeve) runs out in less than 2 hours. As soon as I pop in an 1 Gig IBM Microdrive, it drops to about 1 hour, if lucky. To counter this, I've build a little laptop backpack that has 4 rechargable D-cells putting out the 5V DC that the iPAQ wants... backed up by a 12V DC-AC car converter and 3 solar cells mounted on the backside of the backpack (yes, I know it looks geeky, but stick on a couple Rage Against the Machine stickers and people think it's just a fashion statement, the latest in do-it-yourself geek-wear.)
So, the bottom line is now I carry a bag as big as a laptop whose sole purpose is to power my handheld laptop. Of course, I also charge my Digital Camera and Cell Phone off the same bundle, but I still feel like I'm missing something...
Even if they can't decode it now -- most likely they will be able to easily decode it in n years... so just store it, and run supercomputers on constant decryption mode. Whenever someone gets a "badboy" flag by their name, their priority increases, and more cycles are spent to decode their data...
This would imply that the NSA is keeping records of every message I send...
Does this mean that if my hard drive crashes and I didn't back it up, I can petition them to get my data back? Hmmmm
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA (#2) -
.25V starts the process going, and that further research will show how many can be produced/costs/etc.
However, giving the bacteria a small assist with a tiny amount of electricity -- about 0.25 volts or a small fraction of the voltage needed to run a typical 6 volt cell phone -- they can leap over the fermentation barrier and convert a "dead end" fermentation product, acetic acid, into carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
Logan notes, "Basically, we use the same microbial fuel cell we developed to clean wastewater and produce electricity. However, to produce hydrogen, we keep oxygen out of the MFC and add a small amount of power into the system."
In the new MFC, when the bacteria eat biomass, they transfer electrons to an anode. The bacteria also release protons, hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons, which go into solution. The electrons on the anode migrate via a wire to the cathode, the other electrode in the fuel cell, where they are electrochemically assisted to combine with the protons and produce hydrogen gas.
A voltage in the range of 0.25 volts or more is applied to the circuit by connecting the positive pole of a programmable power supply to the anode and the negative pole to the cathode.
The researchers call their hydrogen-producing MFC a BioElectrochemically-Assisted Microbial Reactor or BEAMR. The BEAMR not only produces hydrogen but simultaneously cleans the wastewater used as its feedstock. It uses about one-tenth of the voltage needed for electrolysis, the process that uses electricity to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen.
Logan adds, "This new process demonstrates, for the first time, that there is real potential to capture hydrogen for fuel from renewable sources for clean transportation."
Basically, this is saying that
Other than recreational uses, what else could this be used for? Telescope cameras pop to mind for space imagery capture. I think current systems use very high-resolution cameras, though anything that drives down prices would drive up quality.
Has someone applied Moore's law to digital camera pixel amount?
I'm continually suprised at how many people are jumping on the .torrent and eMule bandwagon. Over Thanksgiving, my mother (not a techno-elite) told me that she had a secret... and was pirating Audio Books off the internet using such tools. It completely blew my mind that my mom though of herself as a "hacker" and loved the idea.
What ever happened to the days when my family couldn't even understand the basics of web pages? I guess that when the tools are so incredibly useful, and so easy to install/operate, it quickly becomes a prevalent technology.
But, wasn't "Bourne Supremecy (the movie)" based on Bourne Supremecy (book)? I mean, that movie was incredibly accurate to the book.
They had the main character's name correct, at least. And, that there was something involving Asia and Eastern Europe.
The other 400 or so pages weren't apparently used in the screenplay.
Maybe you need one of them new-fangled rat brains. I hear they're pretty good at that problem solving stuff.
That's unfair for all you single people! Married people would only have to pay a few minutes worth every few months.
I joined the Air Force as an officer 6 years ago, and just left a few months ago. When I originally went to Carnegie Mellon University, I took multiple classes in Virtual Reality. Unfortunately, the AF would not allow me to take the time off to pursue a Masters in Virtual Reality there... as they needed my computer skills immediately.
I guess I was just 4 years early... those skills are in very high demand, now.
Anyone catch the Shrek 2 scene where the city is being assaulted and the wave of citizens runs screaming from one StarBucks across the street to another?
I just finished over 160 hours of driving alone.
Rather than listen to the same 20 current "top hit" songs play for approximately 120 times each, I loaded all of the Douglas Adams audio books onto my trusty Creative Nomad 60 gig player (hey, why support the iPod -- every cent goes to the enemy! Viva la Microsoft!)
It was the most enjoyable trip I've ever taken. I had no road rage, I smiled, I laughed, I cried. Those are great books, and I can't wait to hear them all remade again.
If you have to drive/train/bike/job/skydive to work, you might try some audio books... they really take the edge off.
Yeah, I think they had just installed a demo version at their fancy new airport in Paris.
When I was a Freshman at CMU, I worked on a research programming project translating a bunch of the Navigation code for this self-driving HMMWV ("Hum vee"). It was originally written in C, and we converted it to Ada... though I bet it's been reverted back to a more versatile language.
It used multiple cameras mounted at different heights to build a 3D view of it's surroundings, and could judge all kinds of obstacles... though at the time (7 years ago) had a lot of trouble with streams and shadows. I was amazed that it could recognize stoplights correctly, and even signaled when it was changing lanes on a street.
Either way, it was a great project for a young would-be programmer to work on, very amazing stuff, and lots of cool toys to see in the Robotics Institute there.
I received my BS from CMU. Rather than paying for it myself, I took an Air Force ROTC scholarship and begame an officer in the military.
In the past five years since joining te AF, I've personally managed over 10 million dollars of equipment/programing budgets. I'm set up networks and portals across multi-level security systems within the Pentagon. I've done stuff my CS/ECE friends have never dreamed of... mainly because of my excellent CMU education.
I'm currently transitioning out of the Air Force into a consultant job. Just mentioning that I went to CMU has probably added a $5-$10k bonus to my starting salary.
I agree that CMU has an... interesting social environment. I'm as interested in working with humans as with networks, so I might have solved the problem differently than others.
I joined an eclectic fraternity, and had an amazing time. (Many) Fraternities at CMU are different then other schools -- everyone in is a nerd in some sense. Everyone is extremely passionate and/or intelligent. There were parties every weekend, and usually small hang-out parties every night. You will date heavily, both within CMU and to other close-by universities... if you are interested in that.
There is a high male:female ratio, but that's tempered by the fact that most of the males there don't want to date females (or any human, for that matter).
If you love to work hard and play hard, that's an excellent place to be.
Calculate:
(hrs wasted driving/year) * [(# of people who care) * (average value of hour per person)
+ (amount of wear and tear on road) + (amount of wear and tear on car) + (amount of wasted gas) + (cost of polution in air) + (money saved from less accidents)]
Using GPS systems when driving quickly add up some serious savings! Image if the Government paid 50% off all GPSes -- they'd quickly recoup their costs in terms of road/polution/life savings!
If that's not enough, would you sell your GPS coordinates and a detailed buying profile? Advertisers would be able to say -- "80% of people driving this road are interested in their MCSE certfification!", or "30% of people that go down this highway at 5 PM have children in the perfect X-Box purchasing range!", etc... Then, put some animated signs that change based on who's driving by.... we're talking serious advertising $$$!
You could use the same info for tracking speed limits & dangerous roads. I'm not talking tracking when people are speeding, but rather, track when people are speeding stupidly. Imagine if all speed limits in the world were variable, depending on the weather, the amount of accidents occuring in this area, the average age (or skill) of drivers on that road, etc. Wow. I currently live in Germany and drive 100MPH on average -- I hate going back to the states and driving 55. But, German drivers are much more skilled (5 months mandatory driver's training, no exceptions), and have on average much safer and more responsive cars...
Bottom line: Everyone should use GPS systems, and the government should be handing them out like candy. Get some intelligent privacy laws going, and It'd be an improvement for everyone!
I use Excite as my portal, and when you click on the "My Reminders" title, it will take you to an online calendar/contacts list. Search around, and there's a link to TrueSync there.
TrueSync will also synch with my Outlook, my Palm, my iPaq and my Motorola Timeport cell phone. Now, I update one, and everything's immediately updated (also great for synching my work and home calendars with my iPaq).
What makes this game different is (along with the developers actually polling users about their preferences and building them into the game) the amount of attention they are paying to non-gamers. Current discussion threads have centered around making the universe more interesting to females (who typically are a bit more mature and tire of the repetitive womp-rat hunting to gain experience), and others who want a more robust universe to navigate.
There are entire skill trees and abilities planned for dancing, weaving, makeovers (hair coloration/clothing disguise), house building/layout, mining, merchant abilites (owning a store, trading stocks, industrial espionage), politics (mayor of your city/county/planets/galaxy), etc.
As soon as these games hit a certain critical mass, they'll start defining the future of the Net -- where users can move, and dance, and react, and display realistic facial animations. I'm hooked already.
I have an iPAQ with a PCMCIA card slot, sometimes hooked to a AirCard card (sweet wireless 128k download speeds in a taxi!), and sometimes to a Cisco Aironet wireless LAN card. We recently demoed this working through a Tachyon 1.5 meter dish satelite connection, routed to a wireless base station. I was streaming MP3s to a cow farm in Germany. Amazing applications, but one Achilies heel...
The problem: Power. My battery (even with the extra battery in the PCMCIA sleeve) runs out in less than 2 hours. As soon as I pop in an 1 Gig IBM Microdrive, it drops to about 1 hour, if lucky. To counter this, I've build a little laptop backpack that has 4 rechargable D-cells putting out the 5V DC that the iPAQ wants... backed up by a 12V DC-AC car converter and 3 solar cells mounted on the backside of the backpack (yes, I know it looks geeky, but stick on a couple Rage Against the Machine stickers and people think it's just a fashion statement, the latest in do-it-yourself geek-wear.)
So, the bottom line is now I carry a bag as big as a laptop whose sole purpose is to power my handheld laptop. Of course, I also charge my Digital Camera and Cell Phone off the same bundle, but I still feel like I'm missing something...
our network Internet Protection Office has a very apt saying: Convienience is never sacrificed for security...
This would imply that the NSA is keeping records of every message I send... Does this mean that if my hard drive crashes and I didn't back it up, I can petition them to get my data back? Hmmmm