Bacteria microgenerators?
Cool little story here — Wired.com reports on a 16-year-old Montreal student who figured out how to use a certain type of bacteria to generate electricity for a science competition. The bacteria in question is naturally magnetic, and he arranged them in a way that got them spinning and generating a tiny amount of electricity for more than 48 hours.
Beats the Van der Graaf generator I build in 1983 in Grade 8 – got enough of a static charge to burn holes in my knuckes!
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca