Blatant Reality

Back in December it was announced that the US military will help fund some research in creating algae biofuels, particularly aviation fuel.  Now, seven months later, an AP article interviews some of the researchers who received the military’s funding.

In this fairly lengthy interview, the tone is optimistic but at the same time reserved. For example, upbeat statements like these:

Work at the lab is part of a Pentagon project aimed at fast-tracking research to eventually produce algae-based biofuel that costs less than $3 per gallon, can be produced at a rate of 50 million gallons per year and meets strict military standards.

 

“We believe it’s possible. We wouldn’t invest in it if we didn’t,” said Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department’s main research arm.

Are often followed with statements like these:

Back at the Utah State lab — where algae are shaken, stirred and stressed in the name of science — Muhs tempers his excitement over the potential of the green slime with a dose of reality. Algae fuels could be a transition-type fuel in the coming years but aren’t the singular savior to weaning modern society from petroleum.

 

“It’s not a silver bullet,” he said.

However, it is reasonable for scientists to be cautious about being too optimistic. By adding a dose of caution, these scientists will hopefully soften the blow of any setbacks their research may experience. Without it, funding could potentially be pulled if they experienced any setbacks in their research.

It is always better to be a little pragmatic in your predictions and wow your investors with the outcomes than overly optimistic in the predictions and not quite research your goals.

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you have probably guessed that I’m pretty big on the whole algae biofuel bit. Now, however, it seems that algae is being looked at to produce much more than just biofuels.

 The Seattle-based company has come up with a system for generating algal blooms in wastewater facilities and then feeding the algae to other microbes. These other microorganisms in turn metabolically convert the algae into high-value industrial chemicals like propyl butyrate, said CEO Kelly Ogilvie, speaking at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference taking place in Redwood City, Calif.

 

Why? That chemical sells for $801 a gallon, a heck of a lot more than $4 a gallon algae-based biodiesel, he noted. An algae biofuel company might get $500 worth of oils out of directly harvesting and processing algae. The indirect method proposed by Blue Marble can yield $4,000 worth of chemicals from a ton of algae. Harvesting a ton of the green goo costs about $190, he said.

 

And there are environmental benefits as well. Wastewater treatment isn’t cheap or easy. Municipalities spend huge amounts of money dumping chlorine into wastewater to clean it out. Wild algae can take out nitrogen and other compounds from the water as well as the chemical-based processes without the environmental degradation and fossil fuel consumption involved in producing and spreading industrial chemicals in the first place. Plus, unlike chemically treated wastewater, the process yields a feedstock (algae) that can be converted into a valuable product. Other plant matter can be fed into it.

You can read about some other algae wastewater ideas here and here.

Well this is fairly amazing. Today, Solazyme announced that is has successfully created aviation fuel from algae. The remarkable thing about this is that this algae fuel can be developed to be used in standard commercial and military jet engines without any modifications.
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In order to do this, the fuel had to pass the ASTM D1655 which tests the density, stability, flashpoint, and freezing point of the fuel. Solazyme’s fuel passed these tests along with a couple more.
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What this means is that the use of algae as a fuel source would allow aviation companies to keep their fleets intact and without any costly modifications. In the future, I suspect that they will develop algae biofuels that can used in a standard car engine as well.
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Read the story here

Internet Service Provider Comcast looks to place a cap on how much bandwidth subscribers can use a month. The magic number comes out to be 250 gigabytes a month. Take a look what that means in realistic terms:

According to Comcast, a customer would have to download 62,500 songs or 125 standard-definition movies a month to exceed the caps. But high-definition video and video gaming require a higher amount of bandwidth. S. Derek Turner, the research director for the nonpartisan media policy group Free Press, said broadband caps could create a disincentive to view online video.

 

“As media companies put content online, consumers can bypass the cable companies and get their content directly from the Internet,” Mr. Turner said. “A 250 gigabyte cap may seem very high — and it is for today’s Internet use. But it’s essentially the equivalent of four hours of HD television a day.”

 

Critics have charged that Internet providers are trying to protect their cable TV and telephone businesses by stifling Internet access. Comcast says Fancast, its online video Web site, will count against the 250 gigabyte limit, but its digital voice service will not.

Interesting to say the least.

A new catalyst has been developed that separates the Oxygen from a water molecule. The hope is that with this cheap catalysts, researchers will be able to develop a way for the sun to power the necessary reaction, thus creating a new, sustainable source of energy.

Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, has developed a catalyst that can generate oxygen from a glass of water by splitting water molecules. The reaction frees hydrogen ions to make hydrogen gas. The catalyst, which is easy and cheap to make, could be used to generate vast amounts of hydrogen using sunlight to power the reactions. The hydrogen can then be burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity whenever it’s needed, including when the sun isn’t shining.

 

Solar power is ultimately limited by the fact that the solar cells only produce their peak output for a few hours each day. The proposed solution of using sunlight to split water, storing solar energy in the form of hydrogen, hasn’t been practical because the reaction required too much energy, and suitable catalysts were too expensive or used extremely rare materials. Nocera’s catalyst clears the way for cheap and abundant water-splitting technologies.

 

Nocera’s advance represents a key discovery in an effort by many chemical research groups to create artificial photosynthesis–mimicking how plants use sunlight to split water to make usable energy. “This discovery is simply groundbreaking,” says Karsten Meyer, a professor of chemistry at Friedrich Alexander University, in Germany. “Nocera has probably put a lot of researchers out of business.” For solar power, Meyer says, “this is probably the most important single discovery of the century.”

However, this still doesn’t solve all the problems with using hydrogen as a fuel. Another catalyst needs to be developed to create hydrogen ions that is cheaper than the current platinum ones used.

Nocera created the catalyst as part of a research program whose goal was to develop artificial photosynthesis that works more efficiently than photosynthesis and produces useful fuels, such as hydrogen. Nocera has solved one of the most challenging parts of artificial photosynthesis: generating oxygen from water. Two more steps remain. One is replacing the expensive platinum catalyst for making hydrogen from hydrogen ions with a catalyst based on a cheap and abundant metal, as Nocera has done with the oxygen catalyst.

 

Finding a cheaper catalyst for making hydrogen shouldn’t be too difficult, says John Turner, a principal investigator at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, CO. Indeed, Nocera says that he has promising new materials that might work, and other researchers also have likely candidates. The second remaining step in artificial photosynthesis is developing a material that absorbs sunlight, generating the electrons needed to power the water-splitting catalysts. That will allow Nocera’s catalyst to run directly on sunlight; right now, it runs on electricity taken from an outlet.

While this is definitely a promising step in the right direction, I wouldn’t hold my breath until they will discover the necessary catalyst.

I’ve never really been a big fan of solar power for at least wide spread use because of its inherent limitations (sunny Arizona might do quite well with solar power but rainy Washington probably wouldn’t work out so well). However, leave it to scientists (actually MIT engineers) to find a way to get me even interested into the future of solar power.

It seems that they have found a way to use ordinary windows coated with certain dyes to collect solar energy.

MIT engineers have turned plain glass into a virtual goldmine of solar energy with the help of a sophisticated, yet affordable, concentrator developed by them.

 

(…)

 

The technology, using dye-coated glass to collect and channel photons otherwise lost from a solar panel’s surface, could enable an office building to draw energy from its tinted windows as well as its roof.

 

The engineers coated glass panels with layers of two or more light-capturing dyes. The dyes absorbed incoming light and then re-emitted the energy into the glass, which served as a conduit to channel the light to solar cells along the panels’ edges.

 

The dyes can vary from bright colours to chemicals mostly transparent to visible light. Because the glass panel edges are so thin, far less semiconductor material is needed to collect light energy and convert it into power.

 

Because the materials are affordable, relatively easy to scale up beyond a lab setting, and easy to retrofit to existing panels, the researchers believe the technology could find its way to the marketplace within three years.

See, you might not believe me but I had thought about how cool it would be to actually have buildings that use their windows as solar energy collectors. I mean, for skyscrapers, this will give them tons more surface area to collect energy that just having traditional rooftop solar panels.

Now what really gets me excited about this particular technology is the whole “materials are affordable” part. As you probably know, scientists are constantly making some fairly cool stuff but then fail at making it even remotely economical to implement in the real world.

Once again I just want to state I am all for alternative energy sources as long as they are affordable and people are not coerced (by the government or otherwise) to use them. If the technology can survive and prosper on an open market, then by all means. I just hate all the subsidies that the government gives some of these schemes (tax breaks/incentives are a whole different thing).

I can’t wait to see just where this technology will go because it just might give the solar industry to boost it needs to really become one of the front runners in alternative energy.

Want to know what your friend is thinking? Well, unless he is already getting an MRI, you’ll pretty much out of luck. However, scientist has discovered a way to use MRI technology to extrapolate about what a person is thinking.

The study was led by Jack Gallant, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and published on March in the journal Nature. The technique involves brain scanning using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which monitors blood flow patterns within the brain and associates them with images shown to the subjects.

 

It’s not the best of this method so far, but it’s a step forward towards understanding and predicting brain activity. The experiment submitted two of Gallant’s team members, Kendrick Kay and Thomas Naselaris, to a series of 1,750 different pictures. Afterwards, the team of scientists selected 120 pictures the two hadn’t seen before and tried to predict which one they will be looking at by using brain scanning.

 

The predictions proved accurate in 72 percent of the time with one of the subjects, and 92 percent for the other subject. It’s a new accomplishment in accurately decoding brain activity, but scientists are just at the beginning of the road. The challenge ahead now is to decode brain responses from a whole new range of images, without knowing them first however.

Pretty soon people are going to think MRI stands for “Mind Reading Interface” and not “Magnetic Resonance Imaging.”

It seems that starting today, passengers will no longer be able to stow spare lithium ion batteries in their checked luggage.

Starting Jan. 1, airline passengers will no longer be allowed to pack loose lithium batteries in checked luggage, the U.S. Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration warned late last week.

 

Instead, passengers will be required to take loose batteries with them in carry-on baggage, packed in plastic bags. The new regulation, which will go into effect in order to lessen the risk of lithium battery fires, won’t apply to lithium batteries that are already installed in electronic devices, such as laptops, cell phones, and cameras. Those can be checked in.

 

Additionally, only two spare rechargeable lithium batteries will be allowed on airplanes per passenger in carry-on bags.

 

The international rule will become U.S. law on Tuesday.

This is just to cool to ignore. Britain has just developed a tank that can project the image of the view of the surrounding area onto the tank, rendering it invisible.

A soldier, who was at the trials, said: “This technology is incredible. If I hadn’t been present I wouldn’t have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees – but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun.”

Now, I just want to point out that the picture they include in the article of a tank IS NOT the actual tank referred to in the story.