Green Options

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst evolved a new strain of the Geobacter microbe that increases power output per cell by 800%.

The hairy mud-loving microbe uses its hairlike filaments–called pili–to produce an electric current from both mud and waste water. The pili are only 5 nanometers in diameter (20,000 times smaller than a human hair); they’re also a thousand times longer than they are wide. But they are strong!

Wastewater treatment facilities end up dumping a lot of mud that is extracted from the in-flowing water. And, like everything else, that mud takes up space. Space that could be used for other things, even at the dumping yards. But researchers from the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) have suggested, and successfully shown, that the waste mud doesn’t need to be taken to a dumping ground; rather, it can be used as fuel.

Editor's note: We're happy to introduce the newest member of the Green Options blogging team, Eldad Granot. Eldad owns a sustainable marketing company in Raanana, Israel, and will cover sustainable business and development in his home country.

You, too, may find it rather intriguing to that the book of Genesis states that the origin of Man is the “dust of the ground” or “clay” (in other translations). Well, science has long

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