“For the first time, researchers have sustainably produced hydrogen gas, a potential source of clean energy, using only water and bacteria. The challenge now, scientists say, is to scale up the process to provide large amounts of hydrogen for various purposes, such as fueling vehicles or small generators.”
I keep thinking of how to extract electricity or combustible gas from bacteria. And here someone has improved on the process to extract hydrogen in some usable quantity. Seem like there are still a few technical hurdles, but the most interesting comment to me was that they really can’t use ALL the hydrogen the bacteria produce – the bugs need the hydrogen as well. That got me thinking of milking cows – you still need to feed that calf.
Read this article…
“The thumb-size black strip looks like a thin magnet. But in reality, it is an artificial leaf, made of silicon and capable of using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen that can be fed into fuel cells to make power. “You drop it in a glass of water and you walk outside and hold it in the sun, and you’ll start to see bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen,’’ explained Daniel Nocera, an MIT professor who led the team that invented the device.”
Quite cool.
Image from the Globe
Read this article…
“European scientists have created an Escherichia coli strain with a separate genome using chlorinated DNA. The genome should be unable to transfer back into unmodified bacteria, leading to what the researchers call a ‘genetic firewall’.”
First arsenic, now chlorine. In my grad school days, we were studying DNA-protein interactions by modifying specific atoms on the DNA. With this bacteria, it would be interesting to see how the overall biochemistry and enzymatic changes. Opens up a whole new way of studying biochemistry.
And I’d really like to know how they set up their continuous culture system.
Read this article…
“The nature of the day was participatory, so instead of doing a presentation on stage (as I did at Interesting 2007), this time I attempted to get all 200ish people in the room trying, making and tasting things. By-the-by, this is also one of the hardest things I’ve done in years – scaling to 200 people took an awful amount of thinking and prep. Apologies if I’ve seemed scatty in the last few weeks.”
Always something fun and interesting from this guy. He’s a practical microbiologist too!
Read this article…
“The new semi-solid flow batteries pioneered by Chiang and colleagues overcome this limitation, providing a 10-fold improvement in energy density over present liquid flow-batteries, and lower-cost manufacturing than conventional lithium-ion batteries. Because the material has such a high energy density, it does not need to be pumped rapidly to deliver its power. “It kind of oozes,” Chiang says. Because the suspensions look and flow like black goo and could end up used in place of petroleum for transportation, Carter says, “We call it ‘Cambridge crude.’””
Wicked cool. And I’ll point out that, yes, a company has licensed the tech. It’s yet another example of Rob Langer’s formula – proven tech, high impact paper, and passionate ex-grad students working on it.
Read this article…
|
|
