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How to build your own algae reactors

February 6, 2009 /

algae bioreactor

So I wanted to put together a simple example of a bio reactor using simple off the shelf parts and aquarium parts available from nearly any big chain store to make a simple reactor on the cheap. This is the most basic algae reactor design overall and while I used some glass containers for my reactor other ideal containers would be an empty 2 leader bottle or plastic milk jug. This design is really perfect for backup cultures or to keep unique strings of algae’s to start larger reactors off. Using simple off the shelf parts and aquarium parts available from nearly any big chain store these days you can make this simple reactor on the cheap.

Instructions and more projects: AlgaeGeek

(via Grinding)

Human Sewage to Power Buses in Norway

January 30, 2009 /

It is available for free in huge quantities, is not owned by Saudi Arabia and it contributes minimally towards climate change. The latest green fuel might seem like the dream answer to climate crisis, but until recently raw sewage has been seen as a waste disposal problem rather than a power source. Now Norway’s capital city is proving that its citizens can contribute to the city’s green credentials without even realising it.

In Oslo, air pollution from public and private transport has increased by approximately 10% since 2000, contributing to more than 50% of total CO2 emissions in the city. With Norway’s ambitious target of being carbon neutral by 2050 Oslo City Council began investigating alternatives to fossil fuel-powered public transport and decided on biomethane.

Biomethane is a by-product of treated sewage. Microbes break down the raw material and release the gas, which can then be used in slightly modified engines. Previously at one of the sewage plants in the city half of the gas was flared off, emitting 17,00 tonnes of CO2. From September 2009, this gas will be trapped and converted into biomethane to run 200 of the city’s public buses.

Full Story: EcoWorldly

(via Appropedia)

Wind jobs outstrip the coal industry

January 29, 2009 /

Here’s a talking point in the green jobs debate: The wind industry now employs more people than coal mining in the United States.

Wind industry jobs jumped to 85,000 in 2008, a 70% increase from the previous year, according to a report released Tuesday from the American Wind Energy Association. In contrast, the coal industry employs about 81,000 workers. (Those figures are from a 2007 U.S. Department of Energy report but coal employment has remained steady in recent years though it’s down by nearly 50% since 1986.) Wind industry employment includes 13,000 manufacturing jobs concentrated in regions of the country hard hit by the deindustrialization of the past two decades.

Full Story: Fortune

(Thanks Biohabit)

Six Reasons Why Nuclear Power Won’t Get Us Out of This

January 14, 2009 /

1. Length of time to come on stream

2. Insurance

3. Waste

4. Cost

5. Peak Uranium

6. Carbon Emissions

Full Story: Chelsea Green

Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star

December 31, 2008 /

man made star

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

Its goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures billions of times higher than those found anywhere else on earth, from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead. If successful, the experiment will mark the first step towards building a practical nuclear fusion power station and a source of almost limitless energy.

Full Story: Telegraph

(Thanks Cap’n Marrrrk)

Neighborhood geothermal experiment

December 26, 2008 /

When Douglas Worts learned that the City of Toronto was going to fix the pavement on his street, he knew what he had to do: he called his councillor to get it stopped.

Worts has nothing against good roads. But he looks at his street – Laurier Ave. in the Parliament-Wellesley area – as more than a roadway.

He thinks it has the potential to heat and cool his house and others, by providing the footings for a geothermal heating system.

Now the city is interested in the idea, and has given $25,000 to Worts and his neighbours, through the Don Vale Cabbagetown Residents Association, to carry out a feasibility study.

Worts had never thought much about geothermal heating and cooling until he happened to hear that it was being considered for the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa.

He talked up the idea at the Laurier street party in 2007, and some neighbours expressed interest.

He explained that down past the frost line, the Earth keeps a temperature that’s warmer than winter air and cooler than summer air.

Geothermal systems take advantage of that by pumping fluid through underground pipes to carry the seasonal warmth or coolness to the surface.

Full Story: The Star

(via Global Guerillas)

Waste Coffee Grounds Make Great Biofuel

December 13, 2008 /

Too good to be true?

In the new study, Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao Kondamudi note that the major barrier to wider use of biodiesel fuel is lack of a low-cost, high quality source, or feedstock, for producing that new energy source. Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20 percent oil by weight. That’s about as much as traditional biodiesel feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm, and soybean oil.

Growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee around the world each year. The used or “spent” grounds remaining from production of espresso, cappuccino, and plain old-fashioned cups of java, often wind up in the trash or find use as soil conditioner. The scientists estimated, however, that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world’s fuel supply.

To verify it, the scientists collected spent coffee grounds from a multinational coffeehouse chain and separated the oil. They then used an inexpensive process to convert 100 percent of the oil into biodiesel.

The resulting coffee-based fuel — which actually smells like java — had a major advantage in being more stable than traditional biodiesel due to coffee’s high antioxidant content, the researchers say. Solids left over from the conversion can be converted to ethanol or used as compost, the report notes. The scientists estimate that the process could make a profit of more than $8 million a year in the U.S. alone. They plan to develop a small pilot plant to produce and test the experimental fuel within the next six to eight months.

Full Story: American Chemical Society

Darpa, Dronemaker to Brew Algae-Based Jet Fuel

December 13, 2008 /

Pentagon way-out research arm Darpa and Predator dronemaker General Atomics are teaming up to try to turn algae into jet fuel. The Defense Department announced the $20 million deal earlier in the week.

The idea is to “demonstrate and ultimately commercialize the affordable production” of an algae-based surrogate for JP-8 jet fuel by 2010. The work is going to be spread all over the country, from the Scripps Institutions of Oceanography near San Diego to Hawaii Bio Energy in Honolulu to the University of North Dakota’s Energy and Environmental research center. General Atomics also seems to have pulled down an extra $4 million in Congressional pork money to set up a plant-fuel research facility at Eastern Kentucky University.

Full Story: Danger Room

Video from CyborgCamp

December 11, 2008 /

I haven’t watched this yet – I was losing my voice and on the verge of a cold, so hopefully it’s listenable.

Here are my presentation notes.

The rest of the presentations from CyborgCamp are here.

Left Behind: the Singularity and the Developing World

December 8, 2008 /

Here’s the presentation I gave at CyborgCamp to kick off a discussion on the developing world, low tech cyborgs, and a “post-everything” world. I’ve integrated notes and external links/references into it.

Thanks to Mamaj and Cameron, Amber Case and the rest of the CyborgCamp organizers, and of course everyone who attended and participated in the session.

Left Behind: the Singlarity and the Developing Third World

Wikipedia:

The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence

The ultimate step is the uploading of our consciousness to computers in space.

In other words, it’s “the rapture for nerds.”

singularity cartoon

(above: A cartoon from Pictures for Sad Children – I don’t share this detrimental view of nerds, but I agree with this bleak assessment of the singularity)

Compared to many parts of the world, in the west we’re already living in the singularity.

We can help people in the developing world with technology, and we can learn new things from the problems of the developing world.

usaid food bags

(above: Rendille Home – Made of USAID Food Bags)

“The Sudden stardom of the third world city” was an essay by Rana Dasgupta that asked the question

Is it going too far to suggest that our sudden interest in books and films about the Third-World city stems from the sense that they may provide effective preparation for our future survival in London, New York or Paris?

Are the problems of the developing world going to be our problems soon? If so, what solutions can we begin to apply here?

To begin, let’s consider a popular urban legend. There’s a persistent rumor that NASA spent millions of dollars creating a pen that works in zero gravity, but the Russians just used a pencil. The story’s not true, but it’s a good design fable.

Here’s an example of someone going the NASA route:

biodetection mine

Aresa Biodetection tried to create a species of plant that would change colors when planted over a mine. It was a great idea, and it was frequently cited by people at WorldChanging as an example of positive biotech. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

mine sniffing rat

The pencil solution? Instead of trying to create a new species of plant, Bart Weetjens’s using an existing species of animal: rats. The rats are too light to set of mines, and they can be trained to find them.

Two more examples of simple solutions:

lifestraw

Life Straw

hippo roller

Hippo Roller

olpc

So, some things we can learn. Justin Boland asks why all laptops don’t have hand cranks. I saw in the backchannel that the reason this was taken out of the XO is that they were constantly breaking – but I maintain that an external handcrank would be a useful feature for any laptop (but I think it would be annoying to have that huge crank on the side all the time).

What can we learn from how people are using mobile phones in the developing world? In many countries, mobile phone use has leapfrogged use of landlines and PCs and Internet.

Here are some ways mobile phones are being used:

Digital Currency (cell phone minutes used as alternative currrency – PayPal was originally intended to be a payment system for mobile devices)
 
Job hunting by SMS – what to do for people without access to Craig’s List (Kazi 560 from Mobile for Good)
 
HIV information by SMS (Project Masiluleke)
 
Agricultural market prices

Election monitoring

Disaster response

wind powered cell phone tower

How can a cellular grid be powered without an electrical grid? Wind and solar powered cell phone towers. Why don’t we take our cell grid off the electrical grid?

portable wind turbine

Above: Engineers without Borders prototype $100 portable wind generator

ocean thermal energy conversion

A more grand scheme: an Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion project in Hawaii. John Craven claims his system creates electricity, free air conditioning, fresh water, and grows crops insanely fast. They are working to setup a facility in Saipan, but Craven asks what a facility like this could do for Haiti.

lifetrac open source tractor

Another interesting project: the LifeTrac (here’s a reasoned criticism of the project, with another interesting example of innovative design for the developing world)

So what can you do?

You can build a system like one of the following:

Kiva

Pledgie

Nabuur

Or donate time or money to those projects.

Or, volunteer for FreeGeek, who turn the global problem of e-waste into a solution for bridging the local digital divide by training anyone who is interested to build computers from recycled parts.

Find out more

WorldChanging
My Heart’s in Accra
Afrigadget
Bruce Sterling
Brainsturbator

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