Green Options

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.

The distinctive “alligator tree,” or sweetgum tree, may hold the key to a more efficient process for making cellulosic ethanol from biowaste.  The sweetgum’s unusually rough bark gives it the reptilian nickname, and it is easily identifiable by the spike-festooned, gumball shaped seed cases hanging from its branches.  But what caught the attention of researchers from the University of Florida is invisible to the naked eye.

“If you are standing in front of a large snake right now don’t panic…” 

So says the greeting message for the Florida Keys python hotline, 888-IVE-GOT1. Over the years enough pet Burmese pythons in south Florida have been released into the wild that one National Park Service scientist has estimated now there could be as many as 30,000 of them in the Everglades National Park area. (Between 1996 and 2006 about 99,000 were imported into the United States).

Researchers at the University of Florida are reporting that the enzymes in the guts of termites could provide a powerful tool for making ethanol from non-food woody plants.

In an upcoming review paper, professor Michael Scharf details how termites — which cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to houses in the US alone each year — might actually prove useful for something that most people could never have envisioned.

Through millions of years of evolution, termites have filled a niche in the animal world that takes precise chemical coordination between the digestive enzymes and microbes in their guts to turn the wood that they eat into sugars which can then be used to “fuel” the termite.

It is this seemingly easy transformation of wood into sugar in the termite guts that holds the promise for future ethanol production, because, once you have the sugar, it’s easy to make ethanol through fermentation.

Now here’s a neat concept that should take root, literally, along roadways across the U.S.: a “linear garden” that provides natural beauty for travelers, educational opportunities for students and, of course, oxygen for all.

It’s more than a concept in Fort Pierce, Florida, where researchers and students have transformed a three-foot-wide, 2,426-foot-long stretch of road into a skinny but beautiful garden featuring nearly 250 different types of trees, palms, shrubs, vines and groundcover plants. Established in September 2005, the linear garden creates year-round color for faculty and students across the street at the University of Florida’s Indian River Research and Education Center (IRREC).