Protein-Powered Device Creates Electricity From Moisture In the Air (phys.org) 112
Slashdot readers fahrbot-bot and operator_error share a report from Phys.Org: Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine. As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an "Air-gen," or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.
The new technology developed in Yao's lab is non-polluting, renewable and low-cost. It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert. It has significant advantages over other forms of renewable energy including solar and wind, Lovley says, because unlike these other renewable energy sources, the Air-gen does not require sunlight or wind, and "it even works indoors." The Air-gen device requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick, the researchers explain. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an electrical current between the two electrodes. "We are literally making electricity out of thin air," says Yao. "The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7." Lovely adds, "It's the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet."
The current generation of Air-gen devices can power small electronics, and they are expected to be brought to commercial scale soon.
The new technology developed in Yao's lab is non-polluting, renewable and low-cost. It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert. It has significant advantages over other forms of renewable energy including solar and wind, Lovley says, because unlike these other renewable energy sources, the Air-gen does not require sunlight or wind, and "it even works indoors." The Air-gen device requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick, the researchers explain. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an electrical current between the two electrodes. "We are literally making electricity out of thin air," says Yao. "The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7." Lovely adds, "It's the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet."
The current generation of Air-gen devices can power small electronics, and they are expected to be brought to commercial scale soon.
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And, as important, what its lifetime and degradation over time is?
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
When extraordinary claims are accompanied by hand-waving and gaping omissions of information, they are also certainly BS.
If a simple protein fiber could really pull both water and energy out of the air, then life would have figured that out at some point in the last 4 billion years.
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But it might just explain how Transformers came into existence.
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That's..not how evolution works bro. At all.
Yes it does. Evolution does not have "goals" and does not "figure things out" expect metaphorically. But evolution also does not make random mutations for billions of years in organisms struggling for energy and moisture, while surrounded by massive quantities of both just a few nanometers away.
The atmosphere contains a hundred quadrillion kilograms of water representing 230 sextillion joules of energy. There are roughly 1e24 bacteria on earth. They have been mutating for 4 billion years. Yet none of t
Re:Numbers, please? (Score:5, Informative)
1) Just because no bacterium has been observed doing this doesn't mean one hasn't. There are far more bacteria on earth than humans have observed.
2) You make a good argument about the extreme variation in bacteria making it likely that, if this is possible, it would have occurred naturally. However, it's important to remember that all lifeforms are somewhat constrained by heredity (bacteria can get around that somewhat by swapping genetic material with other bacteria, but they are still limited by what's out there). From the Nature article, here is the process for making the wire (sorry for any formatting errors, copy/pasting from pdfs isn't always pretty):
Synthesis and purification of protein nanowires Geobacter sulfurreducens was routinely cultured at 25 C under strict anaerobic conditions (80/20 N2/CO2) in chemostats34 in a previously described35 mineral-based medium containing acetate (15 mM) as the electron donor and fumarate (40 mM) as the electron acceptor. Cells were collected with centrifugation and resuspended in 150 mM etha-nolamine buffer (pH 10.5). The nanowires were harvested and purified as described36. Briefly, protein nanowires were sheared from the cells in a blender. Cells were removed by centrifugation. The nanowires in the supernatant were precipitated with ammonium sulfate followed by centrifugation. The precipitate was resuspended in ethanolamine buffer and additional debris was removed by centrifugation. Nanowires were collected with a second 10% ammonium sulfate precipitation and subsequent centrifugation at 13,000g. The nanowires were resus-pended in ethanolamine buffer. This nanowire preparation was dialysed against deionized water to remove the buffer and stored at 4 C.
Like a lot of nifty human inventions, it's not really surprising that nature didn't come up with it when you actually look at the steps involved. The summary makes it sound more "natural" than it really is.
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1) Just because no bacterium has been observed doing this doesn't mean one hasn't.
If a bacteria evolved this ability, it would quickly become the dominant life form on earth. Other life is limited by the availability of water or energy. With plenty of both, this bacteria could colonize every desert, every shady forest floor, every cave.
I think it would be very had to miss.
all lifeforms are somewhat constrained by heredity
In this case, they are more constrained by the laws of thermodynamics.
Re: Numbers, please? (Score:2)
Perfect response. I know that Slashdot has slipped a lot over the years, but it's incredibly embarrassing that 3 hours after posting his comment is sitting at +2 while all of yours are still at 1.
Re: Numbers, please? (Score:2)
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Just because an organism can produce electricity doesn't mean that it becomes the primary energy source. For example, nervous systems also use membrane gradients to create energy, and expend that energy with synapses. Electric eels take this to the extreme, but they still depend on food to provide the sodium and potassium and cellular material to enable this reaction.
With a bacterium that might be able to produce electricity, it would still need the inputs to develop the proteins to allow this reaction. So
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Those membrane potentials you speak of are *electric* potentials, caused by pumping ions around. That's electricity. The metabolism that goes on in all organisms involves shuttling electrons and ions around: electricity.
You do need to obtain the chemical elements that are required, but that's not "fuel", it's building material. The fuel is either photons, used in photosynthesis to knock electrons about, or chemical, used in various forms of respiration or chemolithotropy, to... knock electrons about.
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>If a bacteria evolved this ability, it would quickly become the dominant life form on earth. Other life is limited by the availability of water or energy. With plenty of both, this bacteria could colonize every desert, every shady forest floor, every cave.
You're making an awful huge assumption there - namely that the amount of energy generated for a given amount of biomass dedicated to generating energy exceeds the amount of solar and chemical energy already abundantly available in those environments.
Well, life *did* figure it out. (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't you read the article?
It's a natural protein of a bacteria.
Pulling water out of the air is trivial anyway. You certainly know dry materials that will suck moisture from the air. Plants do it, and so does your cookie when it becomes soft.
I can even see it generating electricity. Not tht far-flung.
The question is, where the water would go, and what would happen to it!
As in: A process that doesn't just involve irreversibly swelling fibers one time.
And as in: Where would the energy actually come from?
Surely it can't be the same water vapor coming out as going in!
All I can imagine right now, is that the water cools/condenses, and flows off. That would definitely be an energy gradient.
I'd need some explanation for how the protein does it, though.
- - - -
Oh, and extraordinary claims with handwavy evidence does NOT mean it is BS, just as it does not mean it isn't BS. It means we have no information, and it is hence USELESS! You cannot conflate the lack of knowledge of something's state with the knowledge of a negative state. That would be just as wrong as assuming knowledge of a positive state. People *always* get that wrong, and it is such a fundamental building block of science.
E.g. science does not say there is no God. It says we lack any information about it, just like we lack information on an invisible pink unicorn, and it's therefore simply ... useless. For predicing the future, so we can act in a way that brings us closer to our goals. Which is the point.
(In simpler words: You can't tell what a "God" wants, and you might just as well have done exactly the opposite all your life, just because an old story book told you so.)
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You certainly know dry materials that will suck moisture from the air. Plants do it, and so does your cookie when it becomes soft.
Neither does so sustainably nor reversibly without an INPUT of energy.
The question is, where the water would go, and what would happen to it!
According to TFA, it works on air at 50% humidity. So the obvious solution is to just let the water evaporate again. Then you can pull it out of the air over and over.
Since the evaporation is endothermic, this would also cool the room. So you could have an air conditioner that takes the heat out of the room and emits electricity which can be sold back to the grid
We have finally found a way around that pesky 2nd law.
Desorption, that's the trick [Re:Well, life...] (Score:2)
The question is, where the water would go, and what would happen to it!
According to TFA, it works on air at 50% humidity. So the obvious solution is to just let the water evaporate again. Then you can pull it out of the air over and over.
Nope. The water has been adsorbed onto a membrane. It's not free water sitting around in a bowl; it won't evaporate into air at 50% humidity, because it's energetically unfavorable to do so.
You have to heat the membrane to desorb the water, or else dry it with 0% RH air (quote from supplementary figure 10 [springer.com]:
"Then the resonator was placed in a sealed container with dry air flowing in to reduce the RH to ~0% inside to drive away adsorbed moisture in the nanowire film.")
If you're looking for where the en
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Yes, that's his point. The article suggests this process is an energy source. At best it's kind of a battery, that gives power as long as your dessicant can absorb water, but then it stops and you have to input energy to "recharge" the dessicant by drying it out.
Re: Desorption, that's the trick [Re:Well, life... (Score:2)
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If you're comparing saturating a nanometer thick manufactured protein desiccant to exhausting the planet's supply of fossil fuels and fissionable elements then you're the pedant.
Did you think harvesting heat energy from humans in the Matrix was a great idea too?
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Actually yeah, we've already depleted a few accessible high-quality forms of hydrocarbon reserves and pretty much everything that isn't some form of low-grade wet coal won't last more than a few more generations.
What was the first energy harvesting idea I thought was a great idea?
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Yes. So let's use some numbers:
Energy content of a typical laptop battery (an "energy storage" device): ~400 x 10^3 J
Lifetime in typical use: ~ 8 hours (yeah right)
Energy content of world oil reserves (typically referred to as and "energy source"): ~ 5.5 x 10^20 J used so far, plus ~ 2 x 10^21 J fairly certain reserves remaining.
Lifetime in typical use: ~ 150 years (100 used).
You're technically correct, oil is just a store of energy, not a source. In fact, we don't know of any sources of energy! But for pr
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We have finally found a way around that pesky 2nd law.
Actually not, as the room is a closed system.
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The question is, where the water would go, and what would happen to it!
My understanding (although I just briefly skimmed it so far) is that the moisture will travel both ways through the membrane. It's the process of travelling through the membrane that causes the electrical generation. Water molecules bouncing around aren't always pure H20, they ionize and deionize and this membrane takes advantage of that.
Water molecules in air natu-rally comprise ionized species25–27, or are ionized when adsorbed on the nanowire surface. The ionized clusters (for example, H(H2O)n+/HO(H2O)n) donate charge (for example, H+/e) to the nanowire, supply-ing the closed-loop current flow driven by the voltage resulting from the moisture gradient. A dynamic adsorption–desorption exchange of water molecules at the interface provides a continuous input. The ambient environment provides a large reservoir for this continuous exchange of water molecules to generate a sustained electric output (Fig. 1c).
It appears that this part is still theoretical. They have actually observed this producing electricity, but they're speculating as to what's going on chemically (that's not
Re: Well, life *did* figure it out. (Score:3)
My understanding (although I just briefly skimmed it so far) is that the moisture will travel both ways through the membrane.
That's wonderful, except there's no explanation of how you can force water to repeatedly go back and forth through a membrane. Right now the entire article just boils down to "magic".
It's the same thing with perpetual motion machines. Most of them break down to the same kind of argument you're making. My favourite example was a "science project" I saw in highschool where a waterfall drives a turbine which pumps the water back up to the top of the hill to fall and drive the turbine again. Sure, the water
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That's wonderful, except there's no explanation of how you can force water to repeatedly go back and forth through a membrane
There is no forcing. As I understand it, it's just diffusion. It's not a perpetual motion machine because it's using moisture as a fuel source. In the experiment, they deprive it of humidity and it ceases to produce electricity.
Although the big claim the summary and phys.org article emphasized was that it could undergo this process in a desert, the actual article notes that in such low humidity environments the production drops and it ceases to produce anything below a relative humidity of 20%. Basically, l
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It's obviously not a perpetual motion system since the energy enters the system from the outside in the form of ionized hydrogen. If the premise of naturally existing hydrogen ions in the ambient air is correct, then you can potentially collect their electric charge. The atmosphere is very large, plus the ionization is probably driven by sunlight, so it would represent a limitless fuel supply.
I suspect the power density is far too low for this to be useful at a microscopic scale so micro-organisms couldn't
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Cookies become hard when sitting out.
That depends on the relative humidity of the environment.
Not perpetual motion [Re:Numbers, please?] (Score:2)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Reading through the supplementary material, it's not as extraordinary as the headline and abstract make out.
As far as I can tell, it produces power by adsorbing atmospheric humidity onto a membrane. Once the membrane is saturated, it stops producing power, of course.
You can desorb the water by heating the membrane, or by putting it into a low humidity environment.
...the claim "significant implications for the future of renewable energy" is a bit of hyperbole. It generates renewable power... from heat (if
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No, they claim 20 hours of useful current generation and then 5 hours of "self charging" which doesn't involve an external power input.
If I'm reading (well skimming some) it right their claims are that the device while generating energy creates a gradient trap that causes
more adsorption, and ions are released by ionized water naturally occurring in the air. Then when the device is allowed to "self charge"
this trap no longer exists and the water evaporates back out. Whether the gain in net energy is due to
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Basically concurrence with your questions. Below is the version when I submitted the story a while back. (I linked to a different source, but I also checked this version to see if there were any answers.)
Interesting new technology seems to be too good to be true. Moisture in the air is converted to electricity? But I still have a few questions that weren't answered in the article. Nor could I find the original source article in Nature. First question is where does the water go? It seems the device needs to have some sort of drain (which could become clogged). My next question is about the potential problems if this technology is used on a large scale. I'm thinking of a REALLY large scale...
Re:Numbers, please? (Score:5, Interesting)
(0.5V)* (17 uA / cm^2) = 85 milliWatts / m^2
So on a practical engineering level, it doesn't sound like an exaggeration. Don't be put off by the small watttage per m^2. Unlike solar or wind, you could stack these pretty densely as long as each sheet has clear access to humidity in the air.
Unfortunately I don't have a subscription so can't read the meat of the journal article. Is this getting its energy from oxidizing the anode? Which would be a parlor trick (akin to lighting a light bulb with wires plugged into a lemon - the energy is coming from corrosion of the wires, not the lemon).
Or is it somehow converting energy released from the phase change of water vapor to liquid water, into electricity. Which would be revolutionary. Basically it'd be a form of solar energy, except using the entire surface area of the oceans as the collector for solar power. Sunlight evaporates water from the oceans to create water vapor, and this thing extracts energy while condensing that vapor back into liquid. The same thing happens when you pull an ice cold beer out of the fridge. The water condensing on the bottle comes from water vapor. The energy released by the condensation becomes heat, which goes into warming up your beer. Heat energy is rather worthless. But if this thing is instead converting that energy into electricity...
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" The same thing happens when you pull an ice cold beer out of the fridge... But if this thing is instead converting that energy into electricity..."
Then electricity would be free, as in free beer!
Re:Numbers, please? (Score:4, Funny)
Every time you guys ask, we check our database. And once again, we have nobody called "Beer" in our systems. So please stop asking.
Signed,
the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
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While I can't attest to the veracity of the claims in the summary, there is a helluva lot of energy to be gained from condensing water. Water has a heat of vaporaization [engineeringtoolbox.com] of (at room temperature) 2442 kJ/kg. So condensing just 1 liter of water over the span of an hour will generate 2442 kJ / 3600 sec = 678 Watts. That's why it take
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Here is a simple thought experiment:
You have a container with a bowl of water and air above it at 50% humidity. The container also has one of these devices.
Since the air is not saturated, water will evaporate from the bowl endothermically, cooling the water.
According to the summary, you can pull water out of the air, dump it back into the bowl, and extract electricity as a byproduct.
So the net result is that the container gets colder as electrical energy is extracted.
This is a clear violation of the 2nd La
Re: Numbers, please? (Score:2)
The hypothesis is that itâ(TM)s pulling charge from ionised water molecules, not from absorbing the water itself, so in your scenario, your first device would extract energy, leaving in-charged water molecules. The device in the water would not then be able to extract any more energy. Some other process would have to occur to add energy back to the water by ionising it.
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The hypothesis is that itâ(TM)s pulling charge from ionised water molecules
That makes much more sense.
So it is not an energy source, but a really massive and extremely inefficient battery.
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In that sense nothing is an "energy source" since you can't create or destroy energy. Everything that "produces" energy is really just converting it from one form to another, like a chemical battery does but with a different process.
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You just clearly explained it is not a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
To evaporate again it needs energy, from were should it come if not from the outside, by sunlight or something?
Supplementary Information (Score:5, Informative)
PDF available here [springer.com].
This adds some interesting context, like Figure 9 showing rapid falloff of voltage when relative humidity is greater or less than 50%, or Figure 13 showing sharp open-circuit voltage drop after a few minutes, as the device saturates (and recovery after heating to drive out the moisture).
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I think you are misreading that, they were doing experiments rather than observing the normal operation of the device. So for example they are saying that should you reach a point where the wires get saturated you can recover quickly with some heating and they do not seem to suffer any long term ill effects.
This is important not just for longevity but because it fits in nicely with intermittent renewable sources like solar. At peak daylight times you could have a brief refresh cycle, for example.
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I think you are misreading that, they were doing experiments rather than observing the normal operation of the device. So for example they are saying that should you reach a point where the wires get saturated you can recover quickly with some heating ...
Exactly.
and there's your energy source.
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the phase change of water vapor to liquid water...
Re: Numbers, please? (Score:2)
So it's basically a thermocouple variation. Just calculate how much sheets you need to generate 1kW. A square meter is pretty large, even folded up, you'd need something like an AA battery to generate a few mW.
We know the chemistry and physics of energy production, you can't extract energy without some gradient and the atmosphere doesn't have sufficient potential energy in sufficiently unstable format or earth would've blown itself up a long time ago.
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According to the PDF linked above the device makes about 0.55 volts and 150 nano-amps, or 0.0000000825 watts
So you should be able to get one Watt with 12,121,212 devices.
They mention the device is 5 X 10 MM^2 (?) So if that means it's 5 X 10 MM they have an area of 50MM^2.
So 12,121,212 devices X 50 MM^2 gives you roughly 600 M^2, or about 0.15 acres per Watt
There has to be a catch. (Score:2)
If it generates power continuously, how is it not effectively a perpetual motion machine?
If it continuously condenses water out of the air, does it have a reservoir of liquid water that eventually needs to be "emptied" (like that of a dehumidifier)?
If there is no growing reservoir of liquid water, that means the device reaches an equilibrium, where it condenses water at the same rate it evaporates water. How could it extract net energy, when it is evaporating at the same rate it is condensing?
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And what does it do with the water vapor, in order to extract energy?
Condensing it is a possibility.
Breaking H2O molecules apart is right out, because that would require a net input of energy. (That's electrolysis.)
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Would be also useful to get water for irrigation, at least small areas around cities like Muskat in Oman or Dubai.
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So the cost per watt could be quite high.
And since it's a protein that does the work here it's also subject to biological degradation.
That means these proteins will have to be reproduced by the anaerobic bacteria that they use, which will also need food to do so. Food like organic compounds (they can metabolize mineral oils) and metals.
I'd also like to know some more useful numbers here as the article on nature.com is paywalle
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So to generate 1W with the current state of this technology you'd need ~117650 cm^2 -> 11.765 m^2.
To increase surface area you probably can stack them like the fins of a radiator.
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So to generate 1W with the current state of this technology you'd need ~117650 cm^2 -> 11.765 m^2.
For comparison, solar panels generate about 1W from 50 cm^2 and cost about $3 per watt of capacity.
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$3 is rather expensive for solar. Panels have been well under $1/watt for years, even installed domestically you would be ripped off if you paid more than about $2/watt.
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When arriving at that number I also immediately thought that photovoltaic cells have a much higher voltage and current density than these devices.
But I didn't stop thinking at that point and thought about the fact that you can't stack them unless you're willing to waste the potential of all the cells that are below the upmost cell.
With these bio-electrical films, given that you can provide sufficient ventilation to get moisture in between the layers, you could probably re
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We've discussed similar effects for bio-sensors when I was still a student over 10 years ago.
The general idea of a bio-sensor is that you have biological components connected to electrical ones, where the bio-chemical reaction that takes place is then converted into an electric signal that you can measure and process with your electronics and subsequently your software. But for that conversion you often require a transducer of some kind t
Re: Numbers, please? (Score:2)
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Perhaps you should read the article.
They don't use bacteria. They use proteins produced by bacteria and spin them like silk to wires. I doubt it degrades more than e.g. silk.
It is basically a fancy peltier effect.
duration of charging issues (Score:5, Interesting)
"In this house ... (Score:2)
... we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" - Homer Simpson
just NO (Score:2)
You can't get energy from water. Water is in an extremely LOW energy state, due to the hydrogen-water bonds.
What we've got here is probably something else in a HIGH energy state that's using water as a catalyst to release its energy. The energy is coming from somewhere else. That "something else" is the actual fuel, and if you look closely, it has to be continuously added to the system to continue to "extract energy from water".
It's like saying my car is self-powered, and to keep it running forever all I
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Homer's, and my, point exactly.
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Maybe you're wrong (on the internet even!!) The Nature paper says:
"The devices produce a sustained voltage of around 0.5 volts across a 7-micrometre-thick film, with a current density of around 17 microamperes per square centimetre. We find the driving force behind this energy generation to be a self-maintained moisture gradient that forms within the film when the film is exposed to the humidity that is naturally present in air. Connecting several devices linearly scales up the voltage and current to power
Re: duration of charging issues (Score:3)
It's a thermocouple, thermocouples generate energy as well at all times from various naturally occurring temperature gradients.
Problem is as always that you can't build sufficient widgets to power anything useful and the power that goes into construction exceeds all the power it will ever generate.
Re: duration of charging issues (Score:2)
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That sounds terrible, actually. You can't harvest energy from a "self-maintained" gradient. Maintaining gradients *requires* energy.
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From TFP:
However, existing moisture-based energy-harvesting technologies can produce only intermittent, brief (shorter than 50 seconds) bursts of power in the ambient environment, owing to the lack of a sustained conversion mechanism6,7,8,9,10,11,12. Here we show that thin-film devices made from nanometre-scale protein wires harvested from the microbe Geobacter sulfurreducens can generate continuous electric power in the ambient environment.
So that's literally the problem they just solved.
Careful (Score:1)
Careful. You're going to get a long-winded debunking video,
from Thunderf00t, complete with,
well, let's just say an
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
annoying speech cadence,
and Amazon affiliate links to some "science" toy,
to boot.
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Thuderf00t is the only normal person pointing out these free energy/free water scams. And yes, they are all scams. Sure, you can get energy from air moisture, but it would be stupid to do it. There isn't enough energy to make it worthwhile.
I'm sorry, what? (Score:1)
He's just as much a moron as the worst ones he complains about. He's only got an opposite polarity. Aka, just as conspiracy theorists and free energy nutters will believe everying blindly that says there is a conspiracy or free energy, HE believes everything blindly that says there *isn't.*.
Which, to me, is even more disgusting and angering, because at least the regular nutters know others might think they are nuts. But people like him are arrogant and overconfident and full of themselves and believe everyo
Re: I'm sorry, what? (Score:3)
You must be backing some major scams on Indiegogo to be that vitriolic towards an actual scientist.
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Probably bought one of those telescopes. Their backers seem extra salty.
Re: I'm sorry, what? (Score:2)
He's just as much a moron as the worst ones he complains about. He's only got an opposite polarity. Aka, just as conspiracy theorists and free energy nutters will believe everying blindly that says there is a conspiracy or free energy, HE believes everything blindly that says there *isn't.*.
Even if that were an accurate characterisation, you would have to be an idiot to see them as equivalent. I can make up 1,000 different free energy claims in the next week, if I really wanted to. A person who (offhand) says that all 1,000 made up claims are bullshit is in no way the same as the person who made them up in the first place.
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Thuderf00t is the only normal person pointing out these free energy/free water scams. And yes, they are all scams. Sure, you can get energy from air moisture, but it would be stupid to do it. There isn't enough energy to make it worthwhile.
Yes, Nature is an easily-scammed publication.
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Actually, Nature has one of the highest rates of publication of incorrect research. The journal specializes in high-impact research, which tends to be the most unreliable stuff.
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This letter gives a summary, and includes references with numbers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
See especially reference 2, figure 1.
I think they're all open to the public.
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Nature has pretty much the same review procedure as any other reputable journal (that excludes the sea of predatory ones). That's typically two or three reviewers, theoretically independent, but every journal asks authors for suggestions. With high impact journals like Nature, typically the biggest roadblock is convincing the editor that your paper is interesting enough to actually send out for review.
Because Nature editors have high "does this seem revolutionary?" standards, they necessarily reject a lot o
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The huge majority of the retracted papers listed there seem to be specialised medical research, which can be difficult to reproduce. There's no evidence I could see that any could be considered "scams".
And given Nature's high ratio of impactful papers vs retracted papers, nobody would argue against giving their publications the benefit of the doubt.
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Well, I linked to two that were fraud. That would seem to qualify as a scam, no?
You don't typically retract papers because they're simply wrong (or not reproducible). You retract them because they're wrong in such a way that they shouldn't have been published. Just grabbing the first three Nature retractions that come up on Retraction Watch:
1. Global analysis of streamflow response to forest management. Retracted for errors in analysis, data and methods, concerns about data, and conflict of interest.
2. Micr
Re: Careful (Score:2)
"create electricity from moisture in the air ..." (Score:2)
Kinda sucks if you live in the Atacama desert.
Re: (Score:1)
Kinda sucks if you live in the Atacama desert.
Yeah, but it would anyway, so...
Re: (Score:1)
The lead says it works even in Sahara humidity levels. I don't know how much dryer Atacama is, but you probably have more problems living there than just being unable to get electricity from the air.
Re: (Score:2)
It still works at Sahara-level relative humidities of 25%, but the output voltage is halved.
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On the other hand, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi would become energy powerhouses!
Also, imagine you have a Fuel Cell vehicle that produces water vapor. You stick this in the tailpipe--more power! Kinda like a turbocharger--the more exhaust you produce, the more power you get!
*Nothing* lives in the Atacama desert! :) (Score:2)
And if it does, that's because there is moisture around, at that very specific spot. :?
Net gain? (Score:2)
Can it produce more electricity than it takes to make it?
Re: Net gain? (Score:2)
No, at 1W/15m^2 you probably can't even transport it without donating massive amounts of energy into it.
Geobacter does what? (Score:2)
"Geobacter species are anaerobic respiration bacterial species which have capabilities that make them useful in bioremediation. Geobacter was found to be the first organism with the ability to oxidize organic compounds and metals, including iron, radioactive metals, and petroleum compounds into environmentally benign carbon dioxide" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Wow, that sounds really cool, and very usefu - wait, waht? Carbon dioxide is environmentally benign now?
Re: (Score:1)
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The rest of the sentence in the cited reference was, ". . . while using iron oxide or other available metals as electron acceptors."
Might be useful... (Score:2)
I don't see how this can get energy from water. You can go the other way: hydrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, which you can burn to get out most of the energy you put in. But it seems like there is a physics disconnect here.
Re: Might be useful... (Score:2)
Moist Fusion? (Score:1)
For now (Score:2)
"The Air-gen device requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick," Tom Swift interloquted.
Ftfy
LOL... (Score:2)
Nice article on /. but no numbers on how much energy it produces.. I have a feeling that the energy it can produce is probably in the microwatts (of not less)..