Recreating this method means finding materials that can not only detect the presence of an insect but also close on it quickly. At Seoul National University in South Korea, Seung-Won Kim and colleagues have done this using shape memory materials. These switch between two stable shapes when subjected to force, heat or an electric current.

The team used two different materials – a clamshell-shaped piece of carbon fibre that acts as the leaves, connected by a shape-memory metal spring. The weight of an insect on the spring makes it contract sharply, pulling the leaves together and enveloping the prey. Opening the trap once more is just a matter of applying a current to the spring.

Mohsen Shahinpoor at the University of Maine in Orono took a different approach. His robot flytrap uses artificial muscles made of polymer membranes coated with gold electrodes. A current travelling through the membrane makes it bend in one direction – and when the polarity is reversed it moves the other way.

Bending the material also produces a voltage, which Shahinpoor has utilised to create sensors. When a bug lands, the tiny voltage it generates triggers a larger power source to apply opposite charges to the leaves, making them attract one another and closing the trap (Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/6/4/046004).

“We should be able to benefit enormously from these flytrap technologies,” says Ioannis Ieropoulos of the Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK. He and colleagues previously developed Ecobot, a robot that can digest insects, food scraps and sewage to power itself. Ecobot uses bacteria to break down a fly’s exoskeleton in a reaction that liberates electrons into a circuit, generating electricity.

It’s an interesting premise, the bug-eating robot. I’d personally never thought of feeding a machine anything other than electricity (or sunlight for the solar-powered variety).

If you built a robot, which fuel source would you design it to run on?

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Think of us today as embarking on a new Thirty Years’ War.  It may not result in as much bloodshed as that of the 1600s, though bloodshed there will be, but it will prove no less momentous for the future of the planet.  Over the coming decades, we will be embroiled at a global level in a succeed-or-perish contest among the major forms of energy, the corporations which supply them, and the countries that run on them.  The question will be: Which will dominate the world’s energy supply in the second half of the twenty-first century?  The winners will determine how — and how badly — we live, work, and play in those not-so-distant decades, and will profit enormously as a result.  The losers will be cast aside and dismembered.

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In this case, the new alloy — Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10 — undergoes a reversible phase transformation, in which one type of solid turns into another type of solid when the temperature changes, according to a news release from the University of Minnesota. Specifically, the alloy goes from being non-magnetic to highly magnetized. The temperature only needs to be raised a small amount for this to happen.

When the warmed alloy is placed near a permanent magnet, like a rare-earth magnet, the alloy’s magnetic force increases suddenly and dramatically. This produces a current in a surrounding coil, according to the researchers, led by aerospace engineering professor Richard James.

One possible application for this alloy is in automobile exhaust pipes, which vent a lot of heat that could be recycled into electric power for the battery. Read more at Popsci. Link -via reddit

Holy Juan spotted this sign in a public restroom. There’s always a downside to doing the green thing, but if you’re good at sound effects, you can get away with it! Link

Johnson’s latest JTEC prototype, which looks like a desktop model for a next-generation moonshine still, features two fuel-cell-like stacks, or chambers, filled with hydrogen gas and connected by steel tubes with round pressure gauges. Where a steam engine uses the heat generated by burning coal to create steam pressure and move mechanical elements, the JTEC uses heat (from the sun, for instance) to expand hydrogen atoms in one stack. The expanding atoms, each made up of a proton and an electron, split apart, and the freed electrons travel through an external circuit as electric current, charging a battery or performing some other useful work. Meanwhile the positively charged protons, also known as ions, squeeze through a specially designed proton-exchange membrane (one of the JTEC elements borrowed from fuel cells) and combine with the electrons on the other side, reconstituting the hydrogen, which is compressed and pumped back into the hot stack. As long as heat is supplied, the cycle continues indefinitely.

Besides efficiency, the advantages of such a machine are durability, as it has no moving parts, and the absence of polluting waste products. Lonnie Johnson already made a name for himself as the inventor of the Super Soaker. His biography (included in the article) is almost as fascinating as his latest invention. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ben Baker/Redux)

Conventional sewage treatment plants use several different bacteria to break-down the waste and the ammonium and phosphates that are produced thereafter. Each of these bacteria needs different environments that must be created artificially. However, Gijs Kuenen at Delft University of Technology in the
Netherlands has created a new process of cleaning sewage water that uses a recently discovered microorganism called anammox bacteria. It cuts out many of the bacteria normally needed, while producing methane as a byproduct, saving and giving energy at the same time.

One by-product of this [new] process is methane, which Kuenen proposes to harvest and use as fuel. The team calculates that, far from consuming energy, the process could generate 24 watt-hours per person per day. “This is about trying to make waste water treatment plants completely sustainable, in the sense that they could even produce energy, which is not the case in present treatment facilities,” says Kuenen.

Link

(image credit: Jonathan Hordle)

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sshuggi.

As the title suggests, this dishwasher uses pressurized steam to dislodge food particles on dishes and sanitize them. A hearty rinse after the cleaning process gives you squeaky clean dishes!

Now for the Eco-friendly part. Since no detergents are used, there is less of “ozone depleting solvents” going around. The water used in the steam and rinsing is collected in the recycling bay and using “Membrane Technology” (read more info on this here), the grime and food particles are separated from the water. The clean water is recycled to be used again for the next wash.

Contaminated water, too harsh for reusing is discarded via an outlet and only then is a fresh load of water consumed.

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Everyone talks about alternative energy these days but mostly in terms of water, wind and solar. What about cars, cows and tornados?

To meet our future energy requirements, we need to rely on a huge range of alternative sources. Let’s not forget the whimsical beginnings of our efforts to harness electricity (I’m referring to the kite of Benjamin Franklin). It’s only fitting that electricity generation technologies come from left field.

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Scientist at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, are getting ready to do something spectacular: ignite a tiny man-made star inside a lab and trigger a thermonuclear reaction!

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.

The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.

"We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun," said Ed Moses, director of the facility. "It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve."

Inside a structure covering an area the size of three football pitches, a single infrared laser will be sent through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers to create a beam more than 10 billion times more powerful than a household light bulb.

Igniting a tiny man-made star, what could go wrong? Seriously though, this is pretty nifty: Link | National Ignition Facility website | video clip at Wired Science

Is it time for an I Survived the Tiny Man-Made Star T-shirt yet? (Much in the line of our I Survived the Large Hadron Collider T-shirt)

The supercharged surface is embedded with piezoelectric crystals, which transform kinetic energy from passing vehicles into an electrical current. With widespread adoption, the technology could feed energy back into the nation’s burgeoning electric vehicle grid, transforming congested roadways into a clean green source of energy.

The amount of electricity produced isn’t that much (400 kilowatts per kilometer or 645/mi), and there’s no mention on how cost effective it would be. But given the sheer amount of roadways we have (the US has over 4 million miles of roads and streets in its highway system alone), it’s an interesting albeit niche approach to generate electricity.

Link

Litroenergy is a new type of material that emits light for 12 years without needing electricity or sun exposure. The self-luminous micro-particles are called Litrospheres and are said to be non-toxic, inexpensive and equivalent to a 20 watt incandescent bulb.

The Litrospheres give off a continuous illumination, and can be designed to glow in any color. In addition, they are not affected by heat or cold, and are 5,000-pound crush resistant. They can be injection molded or added to paint. The fill rate of Litroenergy micro particles in plastic injection molding material or paint is about 20%.

The constant light gives off no U.V. rays, and can be designed to emit almost any color of light desired. What a cool product!!

Via: Treehugger
Source: Peswiki