PORTLAND – Oregon’s outdoor adventure equipment today is as reliable as its “battery”? This current 2012 “battery” is the one Achilles’ heal of state of the art electronic devices sadly today.
We outlanders ski, run, hike, canoe and drive and thrive for our outdoor adventures to recharge our personal human batteries.
How many times have you climbed to a perfect spot on Earth and simply wanted to take a photo or call a friend. What if you are hurt and one simply wants to call for help in a remote area; but the battery is not now totally recharged?
Pioneer Davy Crockett once was quoted as saying, “I have never been lost; but confused for several days (Smile)”. Some say GPS and all the modern electronic devices today detract from a “Wilderness Experience”; but not many!
The cover photo shows my wife’s creation called a “battery snuggly” to keep loose batteries in pocket from damaging or discharging themselves as we move about. One can alternate the battery tops to show they need re-charging!
Rechargeable lithium batteries today is the best way to go; but the future batteries maybe made from bacterial slime mold?
NASA is currently working on using slime mold to create new batteries for use in Space and we can only hope it leads to a better long-lasting electronic battery for humans later.
“Bacteria and other microbes love living in slimy communities that cling to riverbed rocks and swimming pool walls, contaminate factory equipment and medical implants, and sometimes coat the teeth as plaque. When such microbe gatherings stick to a hard surface, they’re called biofilms. They're also notoriously difficult to clean up, as living in a film helps bacteria weather food shortages and antibiotics better than they would alone. So why would anybody want to try to grow a biofilm?”
NASA looks at using microbes to power up space robots
“Such microbial fuel cells could power space robots almost indefinitely, as long as their bacteria have the tiny amounts of food needed to stay alive and create electricity through their chemical reactions. That would offer an alternative to space missions that rely upon either nuclear or solar power for their batteries — NASA's Spirit Mars rover was officially declared dead last May after the Red Planet's harsh winter deprived it of sunlight for its solar panels.
"Whether you're looking at satellites or planetary explorers, to have a power system that's not reliant on the sun of the solar system, day or night cycles, and hazardous materials such as nuclear or other harsh chemicals, means you really open a lot of doors for expanding the duration of scientific missions," said Gregory Scott, a space robotics engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
Most Americans ironically buy commercial anti-bacteria soaps; but bacteria are basically good. One could not digest food without bacteria in our stomachs and we all appreciate “fermentation” of beer and wine – which is a type of natural bacterial/yeast process.
Moreover, scientific studies have shown outdoor or farm kids exposed to many bacteria as youth have zero Allergies later in life. Thus, multiple bacteria exposures when young actually turbo-boosts our natural human immune systems.
“Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.”
Charles Dudley Warner
Expert NASA RESEARCHER Scott continues:
"Given the fact that they are living organisms, they have a really long shelf life," Scott told Innovation News Daily. "The bacterial colony will live as long as you give it food — in our case, sugar — or one of the other biomass fuels we're looking into. The colony will be able to survive pretty much indefinitely."
Scott and his colleagues hope to make a prototype robot powered by microbes and weighing just over 2 pounds (1 kg) within the next 10 years. The researchers must also figure out how to boost the small energy outputs of such microbial fuel cells even as they shrink the overall size and weight.
Another challenge comes from making even lower-power electronics for the next generation of tiny space robots or rovers. Such electronics must use very little or even no power in some periods to survive on the electricity supplied by microbial fuel cells.
There may be other future uses for bacteria slime coming from genetically engineered bacteriain large according to a current researcher?
“Though many biofilms harm us now, scientists hope that in the future, they can grow genetically engineered bacteria in large, hardy biofilm communities that produce drugs or alternative fuels at an industrial scale. One research grouprecently reported that they've grown a biofilm with two different bacteria. Scientists can control the percentages of each type in the film.
Suppose you want 70/30, or vice versa, or 20/80. You can easily get it," said Arul Jayaraman, a chemical engineer at Texas A&M University who worked on growing the biofilm. “
"If you think of a cell as a reactor and each cell does a particular reaction, you could have a complex set of reactions being done in a biofilm," Jayaraman explained.
Jayaraman’s biofilm population proportion control depended on chemical messages that the bacteria produced. His colleague Thomas Wood genetically engineered the two bacteria types in the biofilm, so that they would send and receive messages that Wood created from chemicals that E. coli naturally use to communicate with other cells in biofilms. Signals from one bacteria could tell the second bacteria population to disperse, and a chemical switch in the remaining bacteria made them break up their own biofilm.
"We show that we can form a community at will and we can tell it go away," Jayaraman said. "This gives us a tool for controlling the composition of the biofilm."
Bacteria's slimy biofilm could help humans
Genetically engineered version could produce drugs or alternative fuels
“For now, the biofilms of the world are still mostly unwanted. They contaminate food processing plants and contribute to tooth decay. Some individual labs now use biofilms in a bioreactor to run chemical reactions, Jayaraman said, but factories of bacteria that produce medicines and eco-friendly fuels may still be decades away. Meanwhile, his team’s feats of bacterial engineering and population control are a step toward harnessing the slime for good.”
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“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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