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A headline from the sort of world I want to live in

Published 1:07AM, Friday, 06/02/2006 in Shiny Rocketship Future, SCIENCE!

Boing Boing: Bacteria eats chocolate and shits electricity

I imagine vats of these little bastards, metabolizing away underneath the local Shell station:

Microbiologist Lynne Mackaskie and her colleagues at the University of Birmingham in the UK have powered a fuel cell by feeding sugar-loving bacteria chocolate-factory waste. “We wanted to see if we tipped chocolate into one end, could we get electricity out at the other?” she says.

The team fed Escherichia coli bacteria diluted caramel and nougat waste. The bacteria consumed the sugar and produced hydrogen, which they make with the enzyme hydrogenase, and organic acids. The researchers then used this hydrogen to power a fuel cell, which generated enough electricity to drive a small fan (Biochemical Society Transactions, vol 33, p 76).

10 Responses to “A headline from the sort of world I want to live in”  

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  1. 1 Tom Jun 2nd, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    Apparently you also want to live in dangling preposition-ovakia !!!! HA!!!

  2. 2 Steve Jun 2nd, 2006 at 9:30 pm

    Did it on purpose. Sometimes you gotta.

  3. 3 Nicole Jun 3rd, 2006 at 1:37 am

    Not true! Sometimes you don’t gotta.

  4. 4 Ananth Jun 3rd, 2006 at 12:18 pm

    English Majors…. why can’t we all just communicate in binary like or future robot masters will.

  5. 5 Steve Jun 3rd, 2006 at 7:24 pm

    Everybody knows you can make smoke come out of the aural sensors of potential Robot Overlords by asking them to come up with a word that rhymes with “orange,” so we have to hang onto English at least that long.

  6. 6 Kate Jun 4th, 2006 at 8:52 am

    Hey…doesn’t “gotta” technically end in a preposition, too?

  7. 7 Ananth Jun 5th, 2006 at 1:45 pm

    that is true. But Dave Issacs can drops two word rhymes in rap for orange.

    Also, who are you to question the robot overlord. They question you.

  8. 8 Tom Jun 5th, 2006 at 2:25 pm

    Isn’t “gotta” really for those who want to live in split-infinitivistan?

  9. 9 Steve Jun 5th, 2006 at 7:16 pm

    Or the Fields of Implicitûr, whence marches the mighty Host of the Understood Predicate.

  10. 10 Tom Jun 5th, 2006 at 8:58 pm

    Sometime you gotta cornhole Jeter like he likes

    That’s the predicate I will choose to understand…and you’re currently killing us in the 3rd.

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