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SPY NEWS |
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We’ve heard heaps about biofuel, green diesel and other range of fuels derived from biomass. CNG, we know, is an environmentally clean alternative to petrol or diesel. But a car that runs on coffee? Yes, you read it right. ‘Car-puccino’, built by a team from the BBC1 science programme Bang Goes the Theory, was recently on display at the Big Bang science fair in Manchester. The car was created using a converted 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco, chosen for its resemblance to the time-travelling DeLorean in the movie Back to the Future.
“Coffee, like wood or coal, has some carbon content so you can use it as a fuel. The coffee needs to be very dry and in pellets to allow the air to move through the pile of coffee as it burns,” Nick Watson, producer of Bang Goes the Theory, has been quoted as saying in Daily Mail. He said the same gasification process could be used to power a car on other unusual fuels, such as “woodchips or walnut shells, construction debris or agricultural waste or landfill.” Dreaming of owning it? Car-puccino does three miles per kilo of ground coffee - the equivalent of about 56 espressos per mile and costs between 25 and 50 times the cost of running a car on petrol. Innovation comes with an expensive tag, after all!
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Who could’ve envisaged CO2 or Carbon Monoxide becoming the solution to the world wide phenomenon of environmental deterioration caused due to fuels? Well, a few scientists in the UK would have you believe that CO2 might just be the answer to our miseries. According to a report published in The Guardian, “a combination of applied solar power and lateral thinking could just turn this into reality.
Trees and algae have been turning CO2 into fuel since the dawn of time, unlocking the chemical energy within this molecule to power metabolic processes. Now, some scientists believe we can follow. With a little ingenuity, it is already possible to transform CO2 into anything from petrol to natural gas. And thanks to centuries of industrialisation, we appear to have a plentiful supply of the stuff floating around us in the atmosphere.
So if we can just find an efficient means of extracting CO2 from air and converting it into a useful fuel, it should be possible both to power our future and scrub our atmosphere clean. But there is, of course, a catch. Carbon dioxide is a very stable molecule. So any conversion processes will take a lot of energy. The question is, can these processes be refined to ensure that less energy is used to create this fuel than is provided by it?
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LATEST SOLUTION TO GLOBAL WARMING: WHALE POO |
You might have heard about Victoria Beckham’s facial cream made out of nightingale droppings. But here’s the latest from the crazy world of science! Whale droppings can prevent global warming. How? The whale droppings are rich in iron and fertilize surface waters allowing for more carbon dioxide absorption.
Because iron is scarce in the Southern Ocean, the whale poop could be a vital additional nutrient in promoting phytoplankton algal blooms that would, in turn, ease carbon dioxide levels in the air responsible for global warming. “We reckon whale poo is probably 10 million times more concentrated with iron than sea water,” Antarctic scientist Steve Nicol told Reuters.
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Illustrations: Arundyuti |
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