Internet fund-raising is all well and good, but for technology that really serves the forces of demockracy, click on this
gizmo.
-------
Hopeful Sign: A little more progress in Richard Feynman’s dream:
Marine Sponges Provide Model for Environmentally Friendly Nanoscale Materials Production, Report Scientists at UC Santa Barbara
Nature was nano before nano was cool," stated Henry Fountain in a recent
New York Times article on the proliferation of nanotechnology research projects. No one is more aware of this fact of nature than Dan Morse of the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research groups have been studying the ways that nature builds ocean organisms at the nanoscale for over ten years. …
"We are now learning how to harness the biomolecular mechanism that directs the nanofabrication of silica in living organisms," says Morse. "This is to learn to direct the synthesis of photovoltaic and semiconductor nanocrystals of titanium dioxide, gallium oxide and other semiconductors – materials with which nature has never built structures before."
Most recently, Morse and his students have made advances in copying the way marine sponges construct skeletal glass needles at the nanoscale. The research group is using nature's example to produce semiconductors and photovoltaic materials in an environmentally benign way – as they report in a recent issue of the journal
Chemistry of Materials.
"Sponges are abundant right here off-shore and they provide a uniquely tractable model system that opens the paths to the discovery of the molecular mechanism that governs biological synthesis from silicon," says Morse. "This sponge produces copious quantities of fiberglass needles made from silicon and oxygen."
Morse directs the new Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, a UCSB-led initiative funded by a grant of $50 million from the Army Research Office, which operates in partnership with MIT and Caltech. He also directs the Marine Biotechnology Center of UCSB's Marine Science Institute. …
He explains that his research group discovered that the center of the sponge's fine glass needles contains a filament of protein that controls the synthesis of the needles. By cloning and sequencing the DNA of the gene that codes for this protein, they discovered that the protein is an enzyme that acts as a catalyst, a surprising discovery. Never before had a protein been found to serve as a catalyst to promote chemical reactions to form the glass or a rock-like material of a biomineral. From that discovery, the research group learned that this enzyme actively promotes the formation of the glass while simultaneously serving as a template to guide the shape of the growing mineral (glass) that it produces.
"Most recently in this research, which is supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Sea Grant Program and the Department of Energy, we've discovered that these activities can be applied to the synthesis of valuable semiconductors, metal oxides such as titanium and gallium that have photovoltaic and semiconductor properties," says Morse. The group is using a synthetic mimic of the enzymes found in marine sponges.
(Big Blue claims it has made some more progress in the teensy world, too.
Nano Patterning: IBM brings closer to reality chips that put themselves together.)
-----------
Not So Hopeful Sign:
Study Says Great Barrier Reef doomed by 2050
By Neil Sands
The brightly-coloured corals that make Australia's Great Barrier Reef will be largely dead by 2050 because of rising sea temperatures, according to a
new report.
Instead of the rich environment depicted in the movie
Finding Nemo, the coral reef will be bleached and replaced by ordinary seaweed, costing the tourism industry billion of dollars, predicts the report into the impact of global warming.
Authors Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, head of the
University of Queensland's Centre for Marine Studies, and his economist father Hans, spent two years examining the effects of rising sea temperature on the reef for the Queensland Tourism Industry Council and the World
Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Their 350-page report on one of the world's natural wonders found no prospect of avoiding the "chilling long-term eventualities" of coral bleaching because greenhouse gases were already warming the seas as part of a process it said would take decades to stop.
"Coral cover will decrease to less than five percent on most reefs by the middle of the century under even the most favourable assumptions," the report said. "This is the only plausible conclusion if sea temperatures continue to rise."
-------------
Hopeful Sign: Sewage Division: Sucking energy out of the drain
Microbes in wastewater make a handy household battery.
By Philip Ball
Flushing the toilet could help supply your home with electricity, thanks to a device developed by US researchers.
They have shown that electricity can be generated from domestic wastewater, which is full of organic matter from cooking, cleaning or sewage.
As a bonus, the dirty water is made cleaner by the process, making sewage treatment easier. By turning wastewater into a valuable economic resource, Bruce Logan and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University think that their system might help make basic sanitation more affordable in developing countries.
The process relies on bacteria that are already present in most wastewater and munch on household organic matter. These bugs burn anything from sewage to left-over cabbage, mainly turning it into carbon dioxide: as they oxidise their food, they strip electrons from the organic matter.
Researchers can harness these electrons, generating an electric current that can be tapped for power generation.
Devices in which bacteria burn organic fuel and convert it to electricity have been made before. They are called microbial fuel cells, and many researchers are now exploring them as potential sources of cheap power - sometimes in unusual places.
Electrodes stuck into the sea bed, for example, can harvest the energy released by bacteria that live in mud at the bottom of the ocean. Although the amount of power that can be generated this way is typically small, it should be enough to drive underwater environmental monitoring equipment.
Logan's device is just one such fuel cell. It consists of a plastic tube 6.5 cm wide and 15 cm long. Eight graphite rods running lengthwise through the tube act as negative electrodes. The positive electrode is a central rod made out of plastic, carbon and platinum. When wastewater is pumped through the chamber, bacteria stick to the graphite rods and channel electrons into them as they eat organic material. The electrons travel through wires to the platinum rod, completing the circuit.
The larger the surface area of the graphite rods, the greater the power generated. The Penn State team has so far managed to extract 150 milliwatts per square metre of graphite surface from their fuel cell. "We believe we can increase power generation to levels of about 1000 mW per square metre," Logan says. A reasonably-sized device would generate enough electricity to power small devices like light bulbs, but not enough to run a whole house. "We are continuing to improve power generation levels," Logan says. …