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Computer powered by colony of blue-green algae has run for six months

143 points by aq3cn 4y ago

andai 4y ago
Since the algae themselves appear to be producing the electricity, does that mean they are electrically charged and could be sorted into groups of more/less efficient algae? ie. using artificial selection to select for electrical output.
- mbil 4y ago
  Riffing on this idea but with no real understanding of the mechanism: could crispr be used to extract the “produces electricity” gene and then put that into bigger organisms?
  - mrcartmeneses 4y ago
    Only if by “electricity producing gene” you mean “is a photosynthesising algae gene”
- Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  my first thought before reading the article was, "are we even talking about an electric computer here?" There are all sorts… some MIT wonks built one that plays tik tak toe that's made of tinker-toys and powered by a crank… in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a computer built from a church pipe organ is used to decrypt third reich punch cars… all quite feasible. But yeah, this is algae-for-electricity… pretty cool regardless, but it does make me wonder if some sort of bio-abacus could be possible
sandworm101 4y ago
Cool, but can this tech ever approach the effectiveness of a smiliarly-sized solar panel? Sure, a solar panel does not directly absorb CO2, but at this point wouldnt a panel generate literally a thousand times as much power without all the maintenace issues?
- kaichanvong 4y ago
  topics could be errr nicer linked perhaps, source being Energy & Environmental Science, NS website tagged: BACTERIA, COMPUTER, ALGAE ... is this the wrong part of the web for you now?
- sp332 4y ago
  Yeah, but solar panels are expensive and usually require international freight shipping. This kind of thing could be made locally and you only need to ship a small inoculation of the algae.
samstave 4y ago
It would be really interesting to see if "light pipes" ('fiber' optics that can funnel sunlight to interior spaces. So stack a bunch of these vertically, but have a light-pipe to each little window to the algea to feed them photons. Trickle charge batteries?
withinboredom 4y ago
I find it funny that a mobile was listed as "low power devices." Phones these days consume quite a bit of electricity, unless they are referring to old-style flip phones, which might use quite a bit less power.
- bin_bash 4y ago
  What like 10w? That’s nothing compared to almost any other application of electricity.
  - maccard 4y ago
    What's your comparison to there? 10w is a reasonable amount of power and you can do lots with it - my M1 Mac can browse the internet on 10w of power.
    - bin_bash 4y ago
      It’s a reasonable amount for computing but not much else: heating, cooling, cooking, refrigeration, washing machine. Those all need vastly more electricity. About the only other household application of electricity I can think of that would use around 10w is lighting and even with LEDs it isn’t much. Probably enough for a single room. My point is if mobile phones aren't considered “low power”, then what would be?
      - stkdump 4y ago
        A clock maybe
      - dahart 4y ago
        The context clearly was computing, and not cooking, right? It’s not surprising that the term “low power” is relative and thus overloaded. But if you bring cooking ovens into a conversation about computers, then a beefy desktop with two GPUs burning hot would be considered low power. I don’t know that there’s a standard definition, but in electronics I think it’s most common for “low power devices” to be referring to sub-watt power levels. There’s regular low power like Arduino, or ultra low power like in this article that consume at most milliwatts or microwatts.
phtrivier 4y ago
Stupid question : do the bacteria manage the create their organic mass entirely from air + sunlight, or does the "container" need a special substrate / soil / etc... ? How fast would that "deplete" relative to the metals in the anode / cathode ? Also, how much does it "capture" carbon as part of the photosynthesis ?
- elsherbini 4y ago
  Here are a bunch of different media people use to grow cyanobacteria: https://www-cyanosite.bio.purdue.edu/media/table/media.html https://www-cyanosite.bio.purdue.edu/media/table/media.html Mostly they need nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur to make protein and nucleic acids, and trace metals,ions, and some vitamins to use as cofactors for enzymes. In the wild, the limiting nutrient for cyanobacteria is often iron or nitrogen. They don't need an added carbon source in their media since they get to eat dissolved CO2 from the air. Every carbon atom in newly synthesized molecules comes from CO2, and there are (very roughly) 10^10 carbon atoms per bacterial cell. http://book.bionumbers.org/what-is-the-elemental-composition-of-a-cell/ http://book.bionumbers.org/what-is-the-elemental-composition... . So if you know the growth rate you can estimate the carbon fixation rate.
  - ascar 4y ago
    > In the wild, the limiting nutrient for cyanobacteria is often iron or nitrogen. How can nitrogen be a limiting factor if ~78% of air is nitrogen? I'm assuming they also take the CO2 out of the air, which just makes up 0.04%.
    - couchand 4y ago
      Not the GP and I do not have relevant scientific expertise, but my memory from beer is that CO2 stays dissolved longer than N2? Are they underwater?
    - elsherbini 4y ago
      Some cyanobacteria can take up nitrogen from the air (well, dissolved inorganic nitrogen), but many can only use organic nitrogen, like N03 or NH4. Those can be limiting in the ocean because lots of life wants to grab it up. Taking up inorganic nitrogen is called nitrogen fixation and takes a bunch of machinery and energy. Also, oxygen inhibits the process, so for photosynthetic bacteria a bunch of extra steps have to be taken to compartmentalize photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation. So not all cyanobacteria can do it, and even the ones who are able to will prefer to take up organic nitrogen if available, and they grow slower when they have to use N2.
LoveMortuus 4y ago
> The computer ran in cycles of 45 minutes of calculating sums of consecutive integers to simulate a computational workload, which required 0.3 microwatts of power, and 15 minutes of standby, which required 0.24 microwatts. The computer itself measured the current output from the device and this data was stored in the cloud for researchers to analyse. > Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues built a small enclosure about the size of an AA battery out of aluminium and clear plastic. That's REALLY not a lot of power, which of course is reasonable, but I do wonder how far can it scale, can it reach any generally usable. Let's take a very conservative estimate of watt-hours of an AA battery of 2 Wh. The computer used in the paper could run for 2,000,000 µWh / 0.3 µW = ~6,666,666h. Let's convert to a more human friendly numbers: 6,666,666h / 24h = ~277,777 days. 277,777 days / 365 days = ~761 years. I probably calculated all of this incorrectly, but I still have a feeling that blue-green algae might not be very scalable... :/
- aliswe 4y ago
  Agreed that it's not a lot, but it was also very small.
- phyalow 4y ago
  I remember running a calculator via a potato battery when I was much younger.
  - ars 4y ago
    Just in case you don't know: The energy to power your calculator did not come from the potato. It came from the metals you used in the potato. The metals are slowly oxidizing and that reaction (a kind of burning) produces the energy. The same thing is happening here - it's not the algae producing energy, it's the metal anode and cathode.
    - ryankrage77 4y ago
      Did you read the article? > "Because the experiment ran without any significant degrading of the anode the researchers believe that the cyanobacteria are producing the bulk of the current."
wwilim 4y ago
Now that's what I call a blue-green deployment
kderbyma 4y ago
brilliant. lets use this with skyscraper design to build in aquaponics into the sides of the buildings and get food production, power generation, and local garden life. and everyone can look out into a garden Oasis with algae generating some of the power back into the system.
sigmar 4y ago
anyone have the pdf? not seeing https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G on scihub and it costs £42.50
- gorgonical 4y ago
  This seems to be a PDF of the paper: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee00233g?casa_token=rixkguG25qcAAAAA:B_1rWv6sSwARZ80uQCqLCCtiEyjMiVNXPU-3jjt1-XL7eRjzdfc5eNwnzH9gd9FvbVoVbJM4MyigVVI https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee0023...
mirceal 4y ago
Now, that's what I call a blue green deployment... of algae.
hamiltonians 4y ago
3 green, 1 blue
thinkyfish 4y ago
While I doubt this will be used for main-line power generation, it might be useful for low cost, battery free monitoring for algae farms.
mleonhard 4y ago
Here is a better and non-paywalled article from the researcher's university: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-create-reliable-biological-photovoltaic-cell-using-algae https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-create-reliab... The paper: https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G

143 points by aq3cn 4y ago

Since the algae themselves appear to be producing the electricity, does that mean they are electrically charged and could be sorted into groups of more/less efficient algae? ie. using artificial selection to select for electrical output.

mbil 4y ago
Riffing on this idea but with no real understanding of the mechanism: could crispr be used to extract the “produces electricity” gene and then put that into bigger organisms?
- mrcartmeneses 4y ago
  Only if by “electricity producing gene” you mean “is a photosynthesising algae gene”
Eric_WVGG 4y ago
my first thought before reading the article was, "are we even talking about an electric computer here?" There are all sorts… some MIT wonks built one that plays tik tak toe that's made of tinker-toys and powered by a crank… in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a computer built from a church pipe organ is used to decrypt third reich punch cars… all quite feasible. But yeah, this is algae-for-electricity… pretty cool regardless, but it does make me wonder if some sort of bio-abacus could be possible

sandworm101 4y ago

Cool, but can this tech ever approach the effectiveness of a smiliarly-sized solar panel? Sure, a solar panel does not directly absorb CO2, but at this point wouldnt a panel generate literally a thousand times as much power without all the maintenace issues?

kaichanvong 4y ago
topics could be errr nicer linked perhaps, source being Energy & Environmental Science, NS website tagged: BACTERIA, COMPUTER, ALGAE ... is this the wrong part of the web for you now?
sp332 4y ago
Yeah, but solar panels are expensive and usually require international freight shipping. This kind of thing could be made locally and you only need to ship a small inoculation of the algae.

samstave 4y ago

It would be really interesting to see if "light pipes" ('fiber' optics that can funnel sunlight to interior spaces. So stack a bunch of these vertically, but have a light-pipe to each little window to the algea to feed them photons. Trickle charge batteries?

withinboredom 4y ago

I find it funny that a mobile was listed as "low power devices." Phones these days consume quite a bit of electricity, unless they are referring to old-style flip phones, which might use quite a bit less power.

bin_bash 4y ago
What like 10w? That’s nothing compared to almost any other application of electricity.
- maccard 4y ago
  What's your comparison to there? 10w is a reasonable amount of power and you can do lots with it - my M1 Mac can browse the internet on 10w of power.
  - bin_bash 4y ago
    It’s a reasonable amount for computing but not much else: heating, cooling, cooking, refrigeration, washing machine. Those all need vastly more electricity. About the only other household application of electricity I can think of that would use around 10w is lighting and even with LEDs it isn’t much. Probably enough for a single room. My point is if mobile phones aren't considered “low power”, then what would be?
    - stkdump 4y ago
      A clock maybe
    - dahart 4y ago
      The context clearly was computing, and not cooking, right? It’s not surprising that the term “low power” is relative and thus overloaded. But if you bring cooking ovens into a conversation about computers, then a beefy desktop with two GPUs burning hot would be considered low power. I don’t know that there’s a standard definition, but in electronics I think it’s most common for “low power devices” to be referring to sub-watt power levels. There’s regular low power like Arduino, or ultra low power like in this article that consume at most milliwatts or microwatts.

phtrivier 4y ago

Stupid question : do the bacteria manage the create their organic mass entirely from air + sunlight, or does the "container" need a special substrate / soil / etc... ? How fast would that "deplete" relative to the metals in the anode / cathode ? Also, how much does it "capture" carbon as part of the photosynthesis ?

elsherbini 4y ago
Here are a bunch of different media people use to grow cyanobacteria: https://www-cyanosite.bio.purdue.edu/media/table/media.html https://www-cyanosite.bio.purdue.edu/media/table/media.html Mostly they need nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur to make protein and nucleic acids, and trace metals,ions, and some vitamins to use as cofactors for enzymes. In the wild, the limiting nutrient for cyanobacteria is often iron or nitrogen. They don't need an added carbon source in their media since they get to eat dissolved CO2 from the air. Every carbon atom in newly synthesized molecules comes from CO2, and there are (very roughly) 10^10 carbon atoms per bacterial cell. http://book.bionumbers.org/what-is-the-elemental-composition-of-a-cell/ http://book.bionumbers.org/what-is-the-elemental-composition... . So if you know the growth rate you can estimate the carbon fixation rate.
- ascar 4y ago
  > In the wild, the limiting nutrient for cyanobacteria is often iron or nitrogen. How can nitrogen be a limiting factor if ~78% of air is nitrogen? I'm assuming they also take the CO2 out of the air, which just makes up 0.04%.
  - couchand 4y ago
    Not the GP and I do not have relevant scientific expertise, but my memory from beer is that CO2 stays dissolved longer than N2? Are they underwater?
  - elsherbini 4y ago
    Some cyanobacteria can take up nitrogen from the air (well, dissolved inorganic nitrogen), but many can only use organic nitrogen, like N03 or NH4. Those can be limiting in the ocean because lots of life wants to grab it up. Taking up inorganic nitrogen is called nitrogen fixation and takes a bunch of machinery and energy. Also, oxygen inhibits the process, so for photosynthetic bacteria a bunch of extra steps have to be taken to compartmentalize photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation. So not all cyanobacteria can do it, and even the ones who are able to will prefer to take up organic nitrogen if available, and they grow slower when they have to use N2.

LoveMortuus 4y ago

> The computer ran in cycles of 45 minutes of calculating sums of consecutive integers to simulate a computational workload, which required 0.3 microwatts of power, and 15 minutes of standby, which required 0.24 microwatts. The computer itself measured the current output from the device and this data was stored in the cloud for researchers to analyse. > Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues built a small enclosure about the size of an AA battery out of aluminium and clear plastic. That's REALLY not a lot of power, which of course is reasonable, but I do wonder how far can it scale, can it reach any generally usable. Let's take a very conservative estimate of watt-hours of an AA battery of 2 Wh. The computer used in the paper could run for 2,000,000 µWh / 0.3 µW = ~6,666,666h. Let's convert to a more human friendly numbers: 6,666,666h / 24h = ~277,777 days. 277,777 days / 365 days = ~761 years. I probably calculated all of this incorrectly, but I still have a feeling that blue-green algae might not be very scalable... :/

aliswe 4y ago
Agreed that it's not a lot, but it was also very small.
phyalow 4y ago
I remember running a calculator via a potato battery when I was much younger.
- ars 4y ago
  Just in case you don't know: The energy to power your calculator did not come from the potato. It came from the metals you used in the potato. The metals are slowly oxidizing and that reaction (a kind of burning) produces the energy. The same thing is happening here - it's not the algae producing energy, it's the metal anode and cathode.
  - ryankrage77 4y ago
    Did you read the article? > "Because the experiment ran without any significant degrading of the anode the researchers believe that the cyanobacteria are producing the bulk of the current."

wwilim 4y ago

Now that's what I call a blue-green deployment

kderbyma 4y ago

brilliant. lets use this with skyscraper design to build in aquaponics into the sides of the buildings and get food production, power generation, and local garden life. and everyone can look out into a garden Oasis with algae generating some of the power back into the system.

sigmar 4y ago

anyone have the pdf? not seeing https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G on scihub and it costs £42.50

gorgonical 4y ago
This seems to be a PDF of the paper: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee00233g?casa_token=rixkguG25qcAAAAA:B_1rWv6sSwARZ80uQCqLCCtiEyjMiVNXPU-3jjt1-XL7eRjzdfc5eNwnzH9gd9FvbVoVbJM4MyigVVI https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee0023...

mirceal 4y ago

Now, that's what I call a blue green deployment... of algae.

hamiltonians 4y ago

3 green, 1 blue

thinkyfish 4y ago

While I doubt this will be used for main-line power generation, it might be useful for low cost, battery free monitoring for algae farms.

mleonhard 4y ago

Here is a better and non-paywalled article from the researcher's university: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-create-reliable-biological-photovoltaic-cell-using-algae https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-create-reliab... The paper: https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G