by frog
Scientists at MIT have built a lithium-ion battery using a genetically modified virus to assemble both the anode and the cathode of a battery.
Three years ago, an MIT team led by Belcher reported that it had engineered viruses that could build an anode by coating themselves with cobalt oxide and gold and self-assembling to form a nanowire.
In the latest work, the team focused on building a highly powerful cathode to pair up with the anode, said Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering. Cathodes are more difficult to build than anodes because they must be highly conducting to be a fast electrode, however, most candidate materials for cathodes are highly insulating (non-conductive).
Now that the researchers have demonstrated they can wire virus batteries at the nanoscale, they intend to pursue even better batteries using materials with higher voltage and capacitance, such as manganese phosphate and nickel phosphate, said Belcher. Once that next generation is ready, the technology could go into commercial production, she said.
This is truly cool stuff. Cracking the energy storage limitations on any front increases our chances of weaning transport from its oil addiction, oil being such a light, convenient and energy dense carrier of sunlight.
As a culture we are still in denial about our profligate waste of all the ancient sunlight we burn just to pop out to the dairy for a pint of milk. Some day soon, probably within our lifetimes, we’ll need to start living within our means – namely within our solar budget.
While this sounds difficult, with a bit of lateral thinking we can develop the clean technologies that allow us to do it easily. The only obstacle is the backwards looking nature of our leadership, particularly in New Zealand.
Our government has chopped off all the research dollars and the tax breaks for research and development, while claiming that they stand for improved productivity. The sooner we’re free of these Luddites, the better.
As for the genetically modified virus, as long as it stays in the lab, I personally don’t have a problem with it. It’s only when we think we’re smarter than millions of years of evolution and turn our creations loose in nature that I think our hubris will be our undoing.
That’s what I would like this thread to be about – an open debate about the advances we can make with our technologies and the lines we have to draw to protect the natural systems that sustains us.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Mon, April 6th, 2009
Tags: battery, Genetic engineering, MIT, new zeland, virus
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
testing my daylight savings adjustment…
It worked! It seems strange to be commenting on a post 40 minutes before you post it…..
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The Green position on the GE ban would seem inconsistent with supporting this type of thing. While I personally suspect the virus is non-aggressive to fauna, the idea of creating a GM virus in a lab that “could escape” or “enter the foodchain” or “put us on a slippery slope” sharply contradicts the policy of non-release of any GM organisms into the environment. Under Green trade policy we could never trade in this battery
Leaving it in the lab is completely pointless – why develop this if you’re never to use it??
Personally, I think it shows the types of things we’ll miss by a complete GE ban. Perhaps a GE ban on anything in the foodchain is a better starting point? Even that I come at from a “marketing NZ” perspective than a real belief in keeping all scientific genetic changes away from food.
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Guess we need those roads after all! Just as well we are building them.
Two issues.
One. Alluded to by Gareth regarding disposal of the battery once it has passed its useful live. we have the light bulb sssue with disposal problems, this one adds to it.
Two. Mangenese and nickel phosphates come from where? Open cast mines? What is the refining process and is it “safe’ to the environment?
Lithium is in vast quantities in the oceans, what is the process to get them from there and is it “safe’ for the environment?
So while yes, the electric car is well on the way, The greens need to take into consideration the whole process from start to finish in environmental terms.
PS. As an aside, the Sydney public train transport system is in big trouble. Hopefully we will learn from that debacle and keep building more roads. We need them!
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Mary Shelly inspired luddite hysteria….
It isn’t up to the government. The government can’t invent things. The best thing they could do would be to get out of the way (slash taxes, have light regulation)
If you were really a friend of innovative technologists, you’d stop trying to regulate and ban everything, and you’d encourage low taxation and offshore investment.
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Our government has chopped off all the research dollars and the tax breaks for research and development, while claiming that they stand for improved productivity. The sooner we’re free of these Luddites, the better.
Such beautiful irony. The Party that want us all to live in mud huts accuses someone else of Luddism.
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Sorry BP – all major networks of a national nature have been sponsored in the past by governments, not sprung up automagically from the market. Roads, telephone systems, electricity generation and transmission, the internet, etc.
In your world none of these would have happened. Your fantasy of the free market fixing everything is not borne out by history.
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Ahhh, you are forgetting corporate-interest-placed-blog-whiners (not naming any names) -the main gift the free-market has given the nation
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Lol! bioneer! You’re not far off the mark, I’d say.
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Roads sponsored by in the past by governments? Gee, I thought they were military assets. So was ARPANet.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the most government’s motivation in outlawing private nationwide telephone and electricity networks was to enhance national security.
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Roads sponsored in the past by governments? Gee, I thought they were military assets. Et tu Brutus
Likewise ARPANet.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the most government’s motivation in outlawing private nationwide telephone and electricity networks was to enhance national security
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If you think Labours miserable government R&D tax credit scheme was going to result in a wave of clean technologies, you’re sadly mistaken. Access to venture capital markets is far more important.
The growth of entrepreneurial culture and venture capital are interlinked.
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>>You’re not far off the mark, I’d say
So far off the mark it’s not funny. Mind you, attacking the messenger is par for the course on this blog, huh.
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Bioneer – there’s something blue, on your shoe! Nice stepping there. I’m with you.
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>>Bioneer…I’m with you
Unemployed?
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Nice one BluePeter.
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I’m not too worried about these viruses getting loose. I expect that the virus would be dead once the battery has been completed, and well and truly harmless once the battery has been through hundreds of charge-discharge cycles and is ready for disposal. After all, the virus is used to make the battery – it isn’t the battery.
Trevor.
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Trevor,
I suspect they’re scared it will morph into a giant ViroBattery monster and roam the countryside destroying organic tomatoes.
Or something.
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You are a prolific blogger BluePeter. On what forum or site do you let loose with all your positive ideas and creative thought? I’m keen to check them out.
The “luddite” term at last has an adept target in this country. The rest of the world is moving away and we are stuck in some bizarre vacumn where the main purpose of the right wing government seems to be social engineering.
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I suspect it will be many years before these batteries will make any significant difference to our transport needs.
This process is likely to increase the cost of the batteries, but decrease their size and weight so I expect that it will be used first where size and weight are worth the extra cost, such as cell phones and laptop computers.
The sheer number of vehicles and the amount of battery storage required is such that it will take any new technology a number of years to ramp up to enough production capacity to make a significant difference. This also applies to most of the other technology fixes to our global energy problems. The development efforts should be supported, but we also need to support getting these technologies into the market. Instead the news is about cut backs in solar cell production facilities and reductions in the number of orders being placed for wind turbines.
One of the steps New Zealand could do is to invest in some of this technology where it is most useful. We could install solar panels and wind turbines on some of our off-shore islands (Chathams, Stewart Island, etc) to cut back on their need for diesel powered generation. We can even back this up with storage systems such as vanadium flow batteries, such as the Australians are doing on Kings Island. To diversify the mix further, we can install some wave-powered generators such as Pelamis or LIMPET on these islands. If nothing else, at least this will help our GHG emissions.
Trevor.
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.
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Either Genetic Engineering is an appropriate science, or it’s not. Surely that must be the platform on which the Green Party’s policies regarding the science must be based.
To suggest that it is OK to decide that acceptability of particular Genetic Engineering on the basis of whether you like the application or not sets the “you” up as a judge without appointment to that role.
It is likely that adopting this attitude will result in ALL the Green Party’s comments and policies regarding Genetic Engineering being received with ridicule.
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Strings Says:
April 8th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
> Either Genetic Engineering is an appropriate science, or it’s not. Surely that must be the platform on which the Green Party’s policies regarding the science must be based.
I think it should be determined on the basis of whether the GE plants, animals or viruses will get the opportunity to reproduce in the wild. It’s not a question of ‘good science’ or ‘bad science’ – it’s a question of biosecurity.
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There are plenty of conventional technological and behavioural advances being made without needing to consider GM viruses as part of the solution.
For instance this engine concept developed from a mathematician who made a fortune from cracking the secret to efficient document storage on computers is combines all the benefits of the rotary, gas turbine and steam engines when used as a replacement for the internal combustion engine in hybrid applications.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/04/concept-compact-twocycle-cogenerating-pistondriven-turbine-to-deliver-60-efficiency.html
This joint venture merges ridesharing communication technology with carsharing systems to implement two ubconventional upproaches to car ‘ownership’.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/zipcar-and-zimride-marry.php
Then there is conventional materials advances
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/04/researchers-achieve-major-advance-in-performance-of-nonprecious-metal-catalysts-for-pem-fuel-cells.html
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“all major networks of a national nature have been sponsored in the past by governments, not sprung up automagically from the market. Roads, telephone systems, electricity generation and transmission, the internet, etc.
In your world none of these would have happened. Your fantasy of the free market fixing everything is not borne out by history.”
Then you don’t know very much history.
Railroads have a history of private development, as do telephone systems (going right back to Bell himself). And the internet is simply an extra service of those private telephone companies (sure, the IP protocol itself might have come out of a government lab, but it is just one of a number of such routable protocols; there’s nothing special about it. It’s just that Microsoft – a private company – happened to choose it for Windows 95, so it became a de facto standard.)
As for electrical generation and transmission, again there is a long history of private development of these utilities.
Roads are something which states take upon themselves and which private companies cannot then compete against. How could a private company compete against a state which wields the power to force people to sell their land and which doesn’t have to justify the expense (in the US, for example, white-elephant roads and bridges make for classic examples of political pork; a striking example being the famous “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska.) Just because governments muscle-out the private sector does not mean for one minute that those activities would not happen absent the state.
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You’ve got it backwards. First, the Internet Protocol wasn’t just another protocol but one designed by the US military to be self healing and crucially was based on an open standard that anyone could use. Second, Microsoft did everything in its power to make its own protocol the standard. It tried to kill IP and failed, wisely accepting reality eventually and giving in, not the other way around. I wonder what else in your history is wrong wat?
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It is cool. But it is not the solution of the problem of lack of power resources. I am sure that the person who will find a good replacement to oil will become the richest man in a history in one second!
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There is no problem of a lack of power resources. The problem is a lack of development of the available resources. There is enough sunlight falling on the Earth to meet our needs many times over, and this can be (and some of it is) harnessed via photovoltaic cells and solar thermal power stations. The latter can still generate power long after the sun has set.
Solar power can be supplemented with wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, OTEC and PRO as well as the current and a bit more hydro power, and we can add in a bit of biomass if we need to. (I’ve probably missed at least one other option.)
These batteries could help us utilise that power for transport.
Trevor.
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