Prickly Pear Cactus Mucilage Removes Bacteria and Dirt from Water, Acting as Purifier
Norma Alcantar and her colleagues extracted the cactus's mucilage - the thick gum that the plant uses to store water, and mixed it with water to which they had added dirt (sediments and bacteria - Bacillus cereus).
For Efficient Fridges: New Magnetocaloric Material Also Cools Under Mechanical Pressure
Magnetocaloric materials have been the most advanced in this field by now. The researchers' new material also produces a caloric effect under hydrostatic pressure. For developing their discovery, they worked on a high-pressure system developed by the UPC.
DIY: How to Build an Energy Meter for Your Stand-by Devices
This DIY presents a device capable of detecting the stand-by mode of low-consuming electronics in your home (like plugged-in phone chargers, without the phones attached) etc. The metering starts when the devices enter stand-by and stop when they start consuming in large amounts.
Microbial Fuel Cell Could Propel Navy Ships for Years, Feeding on Sea Microorganisms
The microbial fuel cell is meant to use naturally occurring fuels and oxidants in the sea to power ships, replacing batteries and fossil fuels.
Danish Hotel Gives Free Meal to Anyone Cycling for 15 Minutes in Their Gym
While pointless as a way to really change something in the course of pollution reduction, a Danish hotel found a way to both motivate their customers to go green by pedaling and give them a free $36 meal voucher.
Rice Husks Making Cement Become Less Of a Polluter
Cement is made by heating limestone with clay at high temperatures, and is responsible for 5 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions, with a ton of CO2 released for every ton of cement produced. To reduce that figure, a team of researchers from the University of Dundee in UK, developed an environmentally-friendly cement made of waste organic materials, such as rice husks.
NREL Researchers Using Solar Cell Technology for More Efficient White LEDs
Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have demonstrated they can produce white light by first making a yellow-green LED, and then combining it with other colored LEDs.
DIY: How to Make a Solar Cell at Home From Readily Available Stuff and…...
A very neat experiment that anyone with some skills can do in the garage or kitchen is creating a solar cell out of blackberry juice and titanium dioxide (and several other components).
Hopes for Solar-Powered Hydrogen by New Virus-Based Artificial Photosynthesis System
A team of researchers from the MIT, led by Professor Angela Belcher, used a modified virus as a biological scaffold for assembling the nanoscale components needed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The bacterial virus is called "M13", and it's said to be harmless.
New SOLO-TREC Thermal Engine Powers Ship Indefinitely by Using Ocean Energy
The Office of Naval Research is funding a project called "SOLO-TREC" (Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangian Observer -- Thermal RECharging), that uses the temperature difference in layers of the ocean to generate electricity and propel a ship theoretically indefinitely.
