Down at ASU, they are working on using bacteria to generate electricity. Is this one of these wacky science pipe dream experiments or is this for real?
I think everyone knows what I am talking about. Science is about finding out what is not known, and to do that, scientists go out on limbs all of the time. Sometimes the limbs fall off and hit the ground. Really really hard. Other times, they find another whole tree to climb around.
There is no way to know until after.
These scientists have basically created an organic battery. And like most great ideas, once it is explained, it seems kind of simple and obvious.
For all of you who don’t remember college biology (I won’t ask why, after all that was college), mitochondria, the little power house inside each shell, are all about moving electrons around, and that is how we get our energy. Inside something called the Krebs cycle, electrons and thus energy is released and thus moved around.
These scientists are basically using the bacteria’s living processes to move some electrons around.
When I first skimmed the headline, I thought, another example of people gathering biogas and burning it to create electricity. Biogas may be a by product and may be used, but the real brilliance of this is harnessing the direct biological processes of bacteria and all life to create electricity.
I’ll be watching this one scientific limb crawling endeavor.
