“We call it fishing for electrons.” That’s environmental engineer Craig Criddle describing a new way that he and his colleagues have discovered for generating electricity from sewage.

Wait. What?

Brilliant, right? The Stanford team hopes this breakthrough technology will be used to harvest energy in places such as sewage treatment plants, or to break down organic pollutants in the “dead zones” of lakes and coastal waters where fertilizer runoff and other organic waste can deplete oxygen levels and suffocate marine life.

And this new power all starts with wired microbes. The mini power plants produce electricity as they digest plant and animal waste from wastewater. Right now, still in the laboratory phase, their prototype is about the size of a D-cell battery and looks like a chemistry experiment, with two electrodes, one positive, the other negative, plunged into a bottle of wastewater.

Inside that murky vial, attached to the negative electrode like barnacles to a ship’s hull, an unusual type of bacteria feast on particles of organic waste and produce electricity, which is captured by the battery’s positive electrode.

Scientists have long known of the existence of what they call exoelectrogenic microbes—organisms that evolved in airless environments and developed the ability to react with oxide minerals rather than breathe oxygen as we do, to convert organic nutrients into biological fuel.

Over the past dozen years or so, several research groups have tried various ways to use these microbes as bio-generators, but tapping this energy efficiently has proven challenging. Part of that challenge for the Stanford team is the cost of the oxide minerals necessary to make it happen. “We demonstrated the principle using silver oxide, but silver is too expensive for use at large scale,” says team member Yi Cui. “Though the search is underway for a more practical material, finding a substitute will take time.”

The Stanford engineers estimate that the microbial battery can extract about 30 percent of the potential energy locked up in wastewater. That is roughly the same efficiency at which the best commercially available solar cells convert sunlight into electricity.

Their study was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image: Xing Xie, Stanford University

The surface temperature of the Sun is about 6,000 Kelvins, while the outer edge of the Sun’s atmosphere, called the corona, can reach millions of Kelvins. Normally, we think of things cooling down the farther they get from an energy source… So how can temperature increase with distance from the Sun’s surface?

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft launches from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on June 27th, with the intention of studying how the corona gets so hot.

“I wonder if maybe we were staring too hard at the corona to understand the corona,” says IRIS scientist Charles Kankelborg, a physicist at Montana State University. “It may be that by backing out we can get some vital clues to what’s happening.”

Between the Sun’s surface and the corona lies a layer of plasma called the chromosphere. Scientists hope that studying this area of lower atmosphere will help them uncover the reason behind the Sun’s strange temperature patterns.

From Earth, we can only observe the layer in question during a total solar eclipse, when the Moon blocks the Sun, and observers can see the halo of glowing light behind the Moon. For IRIS to see this section of sun, it will take images at temperatures between 4,500 Kelvins and 65,000 Kelvins, and ultraviolet spectra between 4,5000 Kelvin and 107 Kelvin.

IRIS is specially designed to target this little understood region of the Sun’s atmosphere. The spacecraft will follow a polar orbit—always facing the Sun—to trace the flow of energy and plasma from the lower layer of the Sun’s surface through the chromosphere and into the corona. Detailed information on this process could give astronomers an archetype for other stellar atmospheres.

Dr. Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator and physicist at the ATC Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, is excited for the launch. “With IRIS, we have a unique opportunity to provide significant missing pieces in our understanding of energy transport on the Sun. The complex processes and enormous contrasts of density, temperature and magnetic field within this interface region require instrument and modeling capabilities that are now finally within our reach.”

The launch takes place on Thursday, so the newest data about our closest star are coming soon!

You can watch the launch here at 6:00pm PDT!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA

In life, you must make choices. You can’t succeed at everything. For example, Tiger Woods is an excellent golfer, but a terrible husband. Shaquille O’Neal? Great at basketball, but acting? Not so much. (Bo Jackson could be the exception.)

Penguins realized this about 70 million years ago, when they gave up flying for diving and swimming. Now, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explains why.

Researchers from the University of Manitoba studied murres, a type of auk—a family of birds that is similar to penguins but not at all related. Apparently, this species didn’t get the message about excelling at one skill. The murres both fly and swim. But research shows the dual skills come at a very high cost.

The scientists measured the energy usage of the birds. According to National Geographic News Watch,

They injected the birds with stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen to serve as tracers to mark the physical costs of their activities.

The team found that when flying, the murres’ sustained the highest metabolic rates ever measured for any animal. (Previously, the bar-headed goose held the record, but they are the world’s high-altitude flying champions.) In fact, the energy costs of the murres were 33% higher than the biologists expected after doing biomechanical modeling of the bird. The birds are sufficient swimmers, but researchers found that the birds’ energy costs while swimming were higher than penguins, who are specialists in the sea.

Lead-author Kyle Elliott remarks in both Nature News and ScienceNOW that the murres are at “the edge of what a bird can do.” And the team suggests that such high flight costs may have led aquatic birds, like penguins, to develop their wings for  propelled diving in response to foraging opportunities at increasing depths, behavioral adaptations that led, finally, to flightlessness.

In short, good flippers don’t fly well. But they’re great for swimming and diving. Fine choice, penguins.

Image: Ken FUNAKOSHI/Flickr

Happy Earth Day! We would like to share a few recent headlines for you to peruse to ponder and protect our planet…

Pollution
From high to low, all around the world, pollution affects our world. Recent headlines show that “Toxic chemicals are accumulating in the ecosystems of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau,” according to Nature. Tiny plastic particles aren’t just trouble in the oceans; the Great Lakes contain millions of microplastics, too. The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog has a short post about the importance of not littering. And National Geographic has an article about how pollution on land can affect marine life like dolphins and local sea otters.

Colorado River
While many U.S. rivers have problems with pollution, the Colorado River’s mismanagement, overuse and drought put it atop the list of Endangered Rivers of 2013. National Geographic has an entire series on the Colorado River delta, and the New York Times has offered both an article and video last week on the region’s hopeful revival.

Drought
Speaking of drought… Do drought-stressed trees cry for help? French scientists are listening for clues. Climate change was not responsible for last summer’s Midwestern drought, according to NOAA, but then what was? And how might we be able to predict future droughts?

Climate Change
Climate change may not have caused of the recent drought, but it is responsible for other devastating events and looming disasters: bumpier flights, more storms, bark beetle plagues, drowned islands, failures in agriculture systems and more extinctions. Researchers are also getting a better handle on tracking climate change through mapping ocean eddies and looking at historic ocean temperatures and air pressure.

Ecology
How do species react to environmental changes? Rapid evolution, according to one study. Another study suggests that endangered species are already doomed. And Nature offers an update on a decades-long study of habitat fragmentation in the Amazon.

Energy
How has energy usage in our country changed over the past two hundred years? NPR has a graph (or four) for that. In response, Scientific American presents a diagram illustrating our potential for future alternative energy use and resources accompanying an article titled, “How to Power the World without Fossil Fuels.” Germany seems to have taken notice—the European country has ambitious renewable plans. But it’s not the only one. The U.S. had a huge year in 2012 for wind power. And, heading across the country soon? How about a solar-powered flight?

Earth Day
Finally, let’s truly celebrate the planet’s holiday with history, maps, jokes about Earth Day, and facts and photos of our beautiful home.

Image: Terra/ASTER/NASA and NASA Earth Observatory

Presenting at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, MIT’s Daniel Nocera, PhD, announced the first practical artificial leaf.

“A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades,” said Dr. Nocera, who led the research team. “We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” he said. “One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”

About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day. It does so by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen. These two gases would then be stored in an electricity-producing fuel cell located either on top of the house or beside it.

Right now, the artificial leaf is about 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf. However, Nocera is optimistic that he can boost the efficiency of the artificial leaf much higher in the future.

And that’s not all. Science Now reports:

The new catalyst also appears highly stable. Nocera says his team has been operating the device for a week, using water from the nearby Charles River in Cambridge, without any drop in efficiency. The next step is to find out whether the device works equally well in seawater. If so, it could dramatically lower the cost of producing hydrogen fuel.

Use in the real world is not so far in the future, according to Discover’s 80beats blog:

Tata Group, an Indian conglomerate, plans on creating a power plant based on this research within the next year and a half.

“Nature is powered by photosynthesis, and I think that the future world will be powered by photosynthesis as well in the form of this artificial leaf,” said Nocera.

Deal me in!

Image courtesy of Wikimedia

According to The Official Google Blog:

When built out, the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC) backbone will stretch 350 miles off the coast from New Jersey to Virginia and will be able to connect 6,000MW of offshore wind turbines. That’s equivalent to 60% of the wind energy that was installed in the entire country last year and enough to serve approximately 1.9 million households.

The construction on the line—a copper cable with insulation and shielding that will not be buried—will not begin until 2013. Initially, the line will potentially carry cheap electricity from Virginia to New Jersey, where costs are high. The plan calls for offshore wind power transmission to begin in 2021.

The entire project is set to cost $5 billion and Google and their partners realize offshore wind is not the cheapest investment, but they’re in it for the long haul. From the New York Times:

Generating electricity from offshore wind is far more expensive than relying on coal, natural gas or even onshore wind. But energy experts anticipate a growing demand for the offshore turbines to meet state requirements for greater reliance on local renewable energy as a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

The Academy reported on offshore wind in April, when a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing the need and efficiency of a transmission line, linking the offshore wind turbines for consistent delivery. The Green Blog in the New York Times describes this project fulfilling that idea:

… the new proposal for an Atlantic Wind Connection is actually about a series of links terminating at substations built on platforms that would sit in the ocean like oil drilling platforms, except, of course, these are clean-energy installations harnessing wind power. They would have to be hurricane-proof and include a spot where a service vessel could moor. Wind farms would tie into the system here.

One step closer to greener, cleaner, and consistent energy…

The chlorophyll was found in cyanobacteria that live on stramatolites in Australia’s Shark Bay. According to New Scientist,

Min Chen of the University of Sydney in Australia, and her colleagues, went looking for interesting chlorophyll in the stromatolites there because the water in which they live – and the trapped sediment that bulks them out – filter out much of the visible light reaching the stromatolitic cyanobacteria. The team suspected that the cyanobacteria might therefore be better-than-average at absorbing the infrared radiation that makes it through.

The new chlorophyll can essentially allow cyanobacteria living deep within stromatolites to photosynthesise using low-energy infrared light. And, Chen says in Scientific American,

“That means that organisms that have this chlorophyll inside can extend their photosynthetic range for maximum use of solar energy.”

This is good news for solar cells. New Scientist reports that:

Because over half of the light from the sun comes in at infrared wavelengths, the makers of photovoltaic panels have been working on ways to extend the section of the spectrum that solar cells can absorb to beyond red.

Maybe this chlorophyll could hold the key to extending that range for solar cells.

There was even more good news for efficient solar energy this week. Scientists are developing self-cleaning solar panels, based on NASA Mars and Moon rovers, to clean the dust off of the panels. According to the BBC,

Dust deposits can reduce the efficiency of electricity generating solar panels by as much as 80%.

This will allow solar to go in dry deserts and other dusty places. Go, Solar! (or Go Solar!)

California seems to lead the charge here in the US. Many of the stories are developing right here. KQED Quest has an entire series on renewables called 33×20—named for California’s goal to have 33% of our electricity come from renewables by 2020.

Earlier this week, the program had a great radio story about wind and solar energy development on Indian land. They site two examples in southern California, but there are several more. According to reporter Amy Standen,

Over the last two years, the pot of federal aid for Indian energy development has doubled to about $7 million a year. Tribes are also eligible for stimulus grants.

The people of the Campo Kumeyaay Nation have found a great way to use land that’s otherwise unusable:

This project… is an enormous source of pride for the Campo people, in part because it makes use of a resource that until recently, didn’t seem to offer a lot of options.

MONIQUE LACHAPPA: Look where we’re located. We’re out here in the middle of nowhere. It makes it difficult for anybody who wants to be able to do more for their family, or send their kids to college.

The New York Times tackles unusable California land—salty or dry earth previously used for agriculture—in their recent article “Recycling Land for Green Energy Ideas”. In the San Joaquin Valley, a large project is underway to bring solar to 30,000 acres of land too salty from years of irrigation to support agriculture any longer. And it’s a win-win situation: landowners and regulators are on board as well as environmentalists:

Unlike some renewable energy projects blocked by objections that they would despoil the landscape, this one has the support of environmentalists.

The project helps ease ever-present drought conditions for farmers, as well:

For Westlands farmers, the promise of the solar project is not clean electricity, but the additional water allocations they will get if some land is no longer used for farming.

With water deliveries slashed because of drought and environmental disputes, he [Mark Shannon] could plant only 20 percent of his property with irrigated crops this year.

“Come hell or high water, there just is not enough water to farm this whole district,” Mr. Shannon, 41, said. “If I lease my land for solar, we can farm elsewhere.”

Finally, in another article, The New York Times looks at Portugal’s aggressive development of clean energy. This year, that country will get 45% of their electricity from renewables—solar, wind and more (Science In Action’s “Wave Power” story included many images from operations in Portugal). By 2011, there will be a national network in place for charging electric cars.

There’s a reason for this forward thinking:

Portugal’s venture was driven by necessity. With a rising standard of living and no fossil fuel of its own, the cost of energy imports — principally oil and gas — doubled in the last decade, accounting for 50 percent of the country’s trade deficit, and was highly volatile.

We can learn a lot of lessons from what they’ve done in such a short time, the article states. The country has developed new skills for new technologies, and they grab power from even the smallest producers—residential solar roof panels, for example. But there are drawbacks, too.

While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.

Although a 2009 report by the agency called Portugal’s renewable energy transition a “remarkable success,” it added, “It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated.”

Only time will tell how it all plays out on our soil. Let’s just hope the process of converting to cleaner energy continues to move swiftly forward.

Creative Commons image by Ceinturion

One of the places it may grow most lies miles from land. Offshore winds are much stronger and offshore wind farms aren’t limited to oceans—they can also be set up on lakes and rivers.

China, already a major player in the wind power game, will start its first offshore wind farm in the Yangtze River delta this month. According to an article this week on the website of Popular Science, “Energy experts predict that China will have invested $100 billion to install 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2020. Such projects would help supply energy to 40 percent of China’s population that lives along the eastern seaboard.”

Europe already has around 30 operating projects but in the U.S., offshore wind farms are still just in the planning and permitting phase. The East Coast is close. According to Monday’s Technology Review, the permitting process is taking a long time, but “last week Cape Wind, which has proposed a wind farm off Nantucket, announced it had ordered 130 turbines.”

A paper published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may further boost wind power in that area. Scientists from the University of Delaware studied five years of wind data from eleven meteorological stations along the East Coast, trying to answer the challenge of fluctuating offshore winds in maintaining a steady power supply.

They found that if they connected proposed offshore wind farms along 1500 miles of the Atlantic, while the wind may die down in some areas, it will pick up in others. According to the paper, “The output from the entire set of generators rarely reaches either low or full power, and power changes slowly,” making it a consistent source.

And what’s happening on our coast right now in terms of offshore wind power? “Not much, yet,” according to PG&E’s Uday Mathur, a Principal in Emerging Clean Technologies. Despite the fact that Stanford came out with a report about the offshore wind potential of California at 75GW, the realities are a little more difficult to achieve.

The main hurdle? Water depth. The continental shelf off California falls off so quickly that the wind turbines that are used elsewhere would be too close to shore in California to be practical.

A floating structure to support a wind turbine could be a solution in our deeper waters, according to Mathur. In fact, he hopes it is. “PG&E would become more interested in offshore wind as floating platforms become more proven and cost-effective. We are continuing to work with industry participants to evaluate the opportunity.”  A handful of companies are currently working on the technology, one even locally.

With a little more time and technology, offshore wind power could be everywhere. Good thing Don Quixote wasn’t a sailor.

Creative Commons image by Phil Hollman