GREEN BEER: The Alaska Brewing Company is being a bit clever and using its own brewing process to power the brewery with a unique boiler system. A furnace burns the waste accumulated from the brewing process, creating steam to power the majority of the brewery's operations. Previously they shipped the spent grain out at high cost to be used for other purposes such as stock feed. The spent grain steam boiler should offset the company's yearly energy costs by 70%. That's a nice bit of almost perpetual motion there.
GROWING DIESEL: We may have the University of Exeter to thank if we can fill up our trucks soon with diesel produced not from oil but from bacteria. The diesel produced by their special strains of E. coli bacteria is almost identical to conventional diesel fuel and the engines that run on it won't need any modification. The next challenge is to make the process commercially viable. Bacteria — so useful.
OIL SOAK: Boron nitride is also known as white graphene and it can do a particularly useful job: cleaning up organic pollutants from waterways. The material has a large surface area for its weight, so it can mop up a lot of pollutants. In recent tests researchers found it could mop up 29 times its own weight in engine oil yet still float on water. Then the oil can be driven out in a furnace or by being ignited so the sheet of boron nitride can be used again. Even better would be to find a way to extract the oil so it could be used productively.
FIRE LIGHT: Put the Voto in a hot cooking stove and the small fuel cell creates and stores energy for an LED light or to charge cell phones. The device has two parts: a fuel cell box contains fuel cards designed to derive energy from the heat of charcoal burning around the box. The other part is a rechargeable handle that remains outside the stove to collect and store the energy. Disconnect the handle after the fire cools and use it to charge a phone or light the included LED. The Voto is designed for developing nations where cookstoves and kerosene lamps are the norm. It's a superb idea, though the initial cost could be a barrier for those who most need this and similar gadgets.
SPEED CHARGE: Charging a cellphone seems to have grown quicker over the years, but Eesha Khare of California thinks it should take only 20 seconds. She's invented a tiny flexible supercapacitor that can last for 10,000 charge-recharge cycles, compared with 1,000 cycles for conventional rechargeable batteries. So far she's only used her supercapacitor to power an LED but she says it could fit inside cellphones and other portable electronics. There's only one question: how soon?
