Let's hope that some of these great innovations reach commercial distribution and soon.
Breakthrough car only needs water to go.
Genepax unveiled the car in the city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a litre of any kind of water - rain, river or sea - was all that was needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km.
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Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.
Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.
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Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
Silicon Valley is looking to develop Oil 2.0
• LS9 is the company behind the petrol-excreting bugs.
• Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources
• Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs
Others see in Algae: the big idea for future energy
Algae, that green stuff in your pond, is being used to make biodiesel in New Zealand. Algae can grow almost anywhere, even in deserts. And some species grow so fast that they double in size three or four times a day. According to Fred Krupp, author of the excellent Earth: The Sequel, it would take only 47 million acres of algae to produce fuel for half of America's cars, compared with 1.5 billion acres of soy beans.
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Algae also eat carbon dioxide at a similarly prolific rate. That makes them multitasking miracle-workers: both a fuel and a way to clean up power-plant emissions. Not surprisingly, several companies are now trying to move from relatively small algae beds to industrial scale.