Lots of interesting ways to harness, save and generate energy have captured my attention recently.
The Wall St Journal points out some in While You're at it, Why not Generate a Little Electricity
Like using the stairmasters and treadmills at the health club to generate electricity for the lights or flooring materials in subways to generate electricty from the throngs of people walking into subway tunnels and backpacks that generate electricity from the jiggling motion of walking.
There's news from the Science Foundation where they've found that using corncob waste to create carbon briquettes may be the way to store natural gas in clean-burning cars given that they can store 180 times their own volume at one seventh the pressure of conventional natural gas tank.
Now there's a prototype of a pee-powered battery, one that runs on a drop of urine and produces 1.5 volts of electric power (same as AA batteries) for about 90 minutes.
But my favorite is Termite Guts Can Save the Planet.
Termite guts take indigestible cellulose, which makes up the bulk of all plant material grown on earth, and convert it to ethanol, which even today is a versatile and popular fuel.
Nobel laureate Steven Chu is kick-starting the effort at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
If scientists can convert cellulose into liquid fuels like ethanol, the world's energy supply and storage problems could both be solved at a stroke.
This is where the termite guts come in. A billion years of evolution have produced a highly efficient factory for turning cellulose into ethanol, unlike anything which humans can yet design.