Green Options

An ecologist and an engineer at Michigan State University are working together to create robot fish that can better monitor various factors in aquatic environments.

Combining the brilliance of nature with some top-notch engineering, these two scientists are on to something and getting the funding for it.

The researchers are breaking ground with this and looking to raise water monitoring to another level.

New research at the University of Florida (UF) has just brought to light a new method in the capturing and guiding of energy that may lead to cheaper and more efficient solar cells.

As part of a National Science Foundation grant program to examine cutting edge ways to make nature work for us, a team of scientists at Iowa State University have been awarded $2 million to unravel how some plants and algae can make hydrocarbons and discover if the genes that govern that process might be isolated.

“These plants are capturing solar energy and creating something that’s chemically identical to petroleum,” said Jackie Shanks, Iowa State’s Manley R. Hoppe Professor of Chemical Engineering, in a statement.

In a first, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a completely tree-powered electrical circuit.

The nano-scale device—approximately 130 nanometers [a nanometer is one billionth of a meter] in size—consumes just 10 billionths of a watt (10 nanowatts).

Unlike the legendary science fair experiment in which a potato-based electric circuit is created using two electrodes (each electrode being a different metal, which react with the starch, causing a potential difference and thus a current), the UW device utilizes electrodes comprised of the same metal, and is able to generate (output) 1.1 volts. “As far as we know, this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree,” according to paper co-author Babak Parviz, associate professor of electrical engineering at the UW.

The “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” lies about 1,000 miles from the coast of California. It is in the North Pacific Ocean Gyre, which is one of the oldest and most diverse ecosystems in the world. The garbage patch has gotten a lot of media attention in the last year. However, due to the fact that one must get on a boat and go all the way out to the patch to study it, there hadn’t been any in-depth scientific analysis of the patch,… until now.

The Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) went on an in-depth search of the “Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch” this month. Their findings were varied.

Scientists have concluded that forests with excessive nitrogen concentrations reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. During a ten year study in Michigan by the National Science Foundation, researchers intentionally fertilized forests with two to three times the current levels of nitrogen. These levels mimic the predicted nitrogen levels of the near future due to fertilizers and exhaust from cars, power plants, and factories.

“It is pretty important to recognize that human effects on the nitrogen cycle have significant effects on climate,” said Alan Townsend, North American director of the International Nitrogen Initiative.

Almost half a million dollars invested by the National Science Foundation over the last 5 years has just yielded a space age material so light and strong that it makes a 28 mile per hour crash feel like a gentle fender blip at 5 mph.

Afsaneh Rabiei has invented a metal foam with such a high strength-to-density ratio that it could revolutionize the auto industry. She says it isn’t the first metal foam, but hers has tested out as the strongest, partly because it utilizes a metallic matrix to support the cell walls.