Computer powered by colony of blue-green algae has run for six months

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2319584-computer-powered-by-colony-of-blue-green-algae-has-run-for-six-months/

by aq3cn • 4 years ago

143 57 4 years ago

I find it funny that a mobile was listed as "low power devices." Phones these days consume quite a bit of electricity, unless they are referring to old-style flip phones, which might use quite a bit less power.

bin_bash4• 4 years ago

What like 10w? That’s nothing compared to almost any other application of electricity.

maccard• 4 years ago

What's your comparison to there? 10w is a reasonable amount of power and you can do lots with it - my M1 Mac can browse the internet on 10w of power.

phtrivier• 4 years ago

Stupid question : do the bacteria manage the create their organic mass entirely from air + sunlight, or does the "container" need a special substrate / soil / etc... ? How fast would that "deplete" relative to the metals in the anode / cathode ?

Also, how much does it "capture" carbon as part of the photosynthesis ?

elsherbini2• 4 years ago

Here are a bunch of different media people use to grow cyanobacteria:

https://www-cyanosite.bio.purdue.edu/media/table/media.html

Mostly they need nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur to make protein and nucleic acids, and trace metals,ions, and some vitamins to use as cofactors for enzymes. In the wild, the limiting nutrient for cyanobacteria is often iron or nitrogen.

They don't need an added carbon source in their media since they get to eat dissolved CO2 from the air. Every carbon atom in newly synthesized molecules comes from CO2, and there are (very roughly) 10^10 carbon atoms per bacterial cell. http://book.bionumbers.org/what-is-the-elemental-composition... . So if you know the growth rate you can estimate the carbon fixation rate.

ascar• 4 years ago

In the wild, the limiting nutrient for cyanobacteria is often iron or nitrogen.

How can nitrogen be a limiting factor if ~78% of air is nitrogen? I'm assuming they also take the CO2 out of the air, which just makes up 0.04%.

hbates• 4 years ago

The liquid in the container would contain medium that contains chemicals that the microalgae need. Heres a common medium recipe BG-11 https://utex.org/products/bg-11-medium

Carbon is captured through photosynthesis and is stored as biomass. But when the microalgae dies the carbon is released again. So to truely store carbon the microalgae needs to be cultivated and buried / contained.

LoveMortuus4• 4 years ago

The computer ran in cycles of 45 minutes of calculating sums of consecutive integers to simulate a computational workload, which required 0.3 microwatts of power, and 15 minutes of standby, which required 0.24 microwatts. The computer itself measured the current output from the device and this data was stored in the cloud for researchers to analyse.
Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues built a small enclosure about the size of an AA battery out of aluminium and clear plastic.

That's REALLY not a lot of power, which of course is reasonable, but I do wonder how far can it scale, can it reach any generally usable.

Let's take a very conservative estimate of watt-hours of an AA battery of 2 Wh. The computer used in the paper could run for 2,000,000 µWh / 0.3 µW = ~6,666,666h.

Let's convert to a more human friendly numbers: 6,666,666h / 24h = ~277,777 days. 277,777 days / 365 days = ~761 years.

I probably calculated all of this incorrectly, but I still have a feeling that blue-green algae might not be very scalable... :/

aliswe• 4 years ago

Agreed that it's not a lot, but it was also very small.

phyalow• 4 years ago

I remember running a calculator via a potato battery when I was much younger.

ars3• 4 years ago

Just in case you don't know: The energy to power your calculator did not come from the potato. It came from the metals you used in the potato. The metals are slowly oxidizing and that reaction (a kind of burning) produces the energy.

The same thing is happening here - it's not the algae producing energy, it's the metal anode and cathode.

hutzlibu3• 4 years ago

"blue-green algae might not be very scalable..."

Actually, the idea is, that they are very scalable, because to make more solar panels you have to manufacture more panels.

To make more algae(and get more power), you just let it grow.

So you still have to build more sun exposed tanks but this is very low tech, compared to cleanroom solar panel manufacturing. What is missing is probably a breakthrough in genetic modified improved efficeny, which is currently indeed very low (way lower than solar panels per area)

ineedasername2• 4 years ago

That's only scalable if the material & labor costs to build and maintain the tanks is within a certain margin.

How many m^2 of algae is required to equal a m^2 of solar? From there you could calculate relative costs, given reasonable assumptions of lowered tank/algae costs as the tech matured.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

I had a dream that some super-algae leaked out of a lab and colonized the oceans killing nearly all marine life.

ars3• 4 years ago

The energy embodied in the metal used to make their housing is more than the entire possible energy they could make in any reasonable timeframe.

So no, this isn't scalable.

On top of that despite them saying the anode was not corrected, it's almost certain the algae aren't making any electricity at all, it's all coming from the cathode and anode oxidizing.

It's easy enough to tell - just let them die and let's see if there is a different in energy output. I can almost guarantee there will not be any difference.

LoveMortuus4• 4 years ago

To be fair, I was unable to find the original document, so we don't actually know how many watts the algae generator can provide, we only know how much the computer that they used consumed, also they did note that after 6 months the algae was dead.

That being said, I'm sceptical about the scalability of the algae generator because it's efficiency would have to increase by about 1000x (if we assume that right now it can generate what the computer used while calculating).

Today an average AA battery has t the capacity of 3Wh some even 4Wh. And at 3Wh you could, theoretically, charge your phone at 5V 1A for like half an hour or there about.

Our in other words, what I'm talking about when I question the scalability is energy density. That's the reason why you can do more then 700km with a car that runs on fossil fuels and maybe 350km if it's not too hot and not to cool with an electric car.

Could we engineer there algae to be 1000x times more efficient or even just 500x more efficient, since as long as the algae is alive you don't really need to charge anything. You do need the sun though, these are, from what I understand photosynthetic algae.

Maursault• 4 years ago

Thank you for the accurate and concise summary of what I wanted to know, but I think that this has larger implications that has nothing to do with computers or algae. As you observed, that is really not a lot of power. And off I go... it is incredible that that is not a lot of power, iow, what can be achieved optimizing for low-power is nothing short of miraculous, and we as a global society... we should suck it up, optimize for low power, and immediately ban everything contributing to Global Warming, and stop it by force if necessary, you know, optimized for zero casualties using psyops and harmless hallucinogenic bombs. We should get with our allies, get China on board, and take over the world, and stop Global Warming with a quickness. Power hogs can read books and sleep at night instead of insisting on more and more power.

tetris11• 4 years ago

I keep looking for, and failing to find, any metrics that suggest that GPUs or CPUs have gotten more efficient and less energy intensive over time. Simple intuition would suggest "yes, obviously, of course", but I would love to see a simple line graph indicating so. Toms Hardware seems like a good place to look, but their comparisons dont overlap backwards very far

sandworm101• 4 years ago

Cool, but can this tech ever approach the effectiveness of a smiliarly-sized solar panel? Sure, a solar panel does not directly absorb CO2, but at this point wouldnt a panel generate literally a thousand times as much power without all the maintenace issues?

kaichanvong• 4 years ago

topics could be errr nicer linked perhaps, source being Energy & Environmental Science, NS website tagged: BACTERIA, COMPUTER, ALGAE ... is this the wrong part of the web for you now?

sp332• 4 years ago

Yeah, but solar panels are expensive and usually require international freight shipping. This kind of thing could be made locally and you only need to ship a small inoculation of the algae.

andai• 4 years ago

Since the algae themselves appear to be producing the electricity, does that mean they are electrically charged and could be sorted into groups of more/less efficient algae? ie. using artificial selection to select for electrical output.

mbil• 4 years ago

Riffing on this idea but with no real understanding of the mechanism: could crispr be used to extract the “produces electricity” gene and then put that into bigger organisms?

mrcartmeneses• 4 years ago

Only if by “electricity producing gene” you mean “is a photosynthesising algae gene”

Eric_WVGG• 4 years ago

my first thought before reading the article was, "are we even talking about an electric computer here?"

There are all sorts… some MIT wonks built one that plays tik tak toe that's made of tinker-toys and powered by a crank… in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, a computer built from a church pipe organ is used to decrypt third reich punch cars… all quite feasible.

But yeah, this is algae-for-electricity… pretty cool regardless, but it does make me wonder if some sort of bio-abacus could be possible

samstave• 4 years ago

It would be really interesting to see if "light pipes" ('fiber' optics that can funnel sunlight to interior spaces.

So stack a bunch of these vertically, but have a light-pipe to each little window to the algea to feed them photons.

Trickle charge batteries?

wwilim• 4 years ago

Now that's what I call a blue-green deployment

kderbyma• 4 years ago

brilliant. lets use this with skyscraper design to build in aquaponics into the sides of the buildings and get food production, power generation, and local garden life. and everyone can look out into a garden Oasis with algae generating some of the power back into the system.

sigmar• 4 years ago

anyone have the pdf? not seeing https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G on scihub and it costs £42.50

gorgonical2• 4 years ago

This seems to be a PDF of the paper:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2022/ee/d2ee0023...

mirceal• 4 years ago

Now, that's what I call a blue green deployment... of algae.

hamiltonians• 4 years ago

3 green, 1 blue

thinkyfish• 4 years ago

While I doubt this will be used for main-line power generation, it might be useful for low cost, battery free monitoring for algae farms.

mleonhard• 4 years ago

Here is a better and non-paywalled article from the researcher's university: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-create-reliab...

The paper: https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00233G

Computer powered by colony of blue-green algae has run for six months

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