Making Hydrogen and Electricity from Solar Energy in one Step

I'm a big fan of advancements in energy production, maybe because I spend most of my time in front of the computer, using a variety of devices and traveling.  I think most of us think about our energy consumption frequently because it's all around us.  We always have a reminder of this need when we pay our monthly bills or run close to being out of gas.

If we look into the future, it looks like we'll be running way more equipment on electricity, vehicles in particular.  Elon Musk and Tesla even recently presented their electric heavy transport vehicle to the public about a week ago.  Several car manufacturers are also experimenting with the release and sale of a few hydrogen-based vehicles.

The trend seems to show we'll be using more electricity and less gasoline.

Best however, would be for us to use more hydrogen as a power source for 2 reasons:

1. We would still be using combustion engines so not as much would change.
2. Burning hydrogen makes only pure water.

The main issue with hydrogen as an energy source is that it currently takes more non-renewable energy to make the hydrogen than what you get in the product.  

Many groups have been doing great work at making it less costly through the use of catalysts or specialized electrodes though, which is good.  Some groups have been experimenting with solar energy instead of electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, which is great because solar is indeed renewable and clean.

One particular group was able to bring the solar to hydrogen electricity to 30% by using composite electrodes.  The electrodes however contain Gallium, which is expensive and polluting.

Others have been making efforts to simply separate the hydrogen from the rest of the water (or methane compound) by using a specialized filter, typically also made out of Gallium and/or Palladium, to some success.  No sun needed, but the liquid metals needed are still pretty bad for the environment.

One awesome group have been doing quite well by using photosensitive protein enveloped in a bi-lipid layer along with some platinum, a titanium dioxide catalyst, and light, to get hydrogen gas.  This one uses metals that are much cheaper and less polluting than others.  

Can we do better?  I discuss the following solutions further in the video below:

One group out of the U.S. Aberdeen Proving Ground Research Laboratory made a discovery (by mistake) that a certain aluminum allow, when in direct contact with water at room temperature, produced copious amounts of hydrogen gas, until the alloy was completely consumed.  This is without light or any energy source.  Just spontaneous.  Now this is interesting because the resulting aluminum can be recovered and you have a disposable hydrogen battery right there that can be used to power specialized equipment in a pinch.

But the best I've found so far is from UCLA researchers.  They've apparently devised a device that can convert solar energy into both hydrogen gas and electricity when water is filtered through.  The device is a combination super-capacitor and hydrogen fuel cell.   Contrary to the other examples mentioned above, the device only uses very common metals like cobalt, nickel and iron, which makes it cheaper and more environmentally friendly.  

This is a very sexy device because cost is always a problem for hydrogen production and having a fuel cell concept, it means that hydrogen can be stored until it is needed and in the meantime, the device is producing electricity from light directly.  

Bottom line we probably need both hydrogen and electricity to run our devices cleanly and cheaply in the future.  Electricity is very useful for constant work but hydrogen can give way more power when you need it most.  It is for this reason why hybrid cars use their combustion engine more when accelerating.  There is just more power in explosions than in electric potential.

On other another note, clever engineers have also designed devices that can create electricity for very specific applications where you just can't have explosions (hydrogen or otherwise) going on or where you just can't have enough surface area to have light convert to electricity or where light isn't always in play.

One of the advancements I really like is this device from Seoul that can use heat differentials at a small scale to generate electricity.  Great to run wearable devices on clothing.  This has been done before, but this one in particular can make electricity from temperature differences as high as 20.9 degrees Celcius.  The more temperature difference, the more juice you can get out of it per square centimeter.

This last one of interest I think has great future for tiny devices such as nanorobots:  making small infinite amounts of electricity from the natural molecular movement of graphene between two electrodes.  The team working on this at the University of Arkansas have tested the concept and it would be enough to run watches forever (same as quartz concepts).  This is not useful to produce energy for a home, but anything that needs tiny amounts of electricity could use this without need for batteries, or quartz crystals, which is tremendously advantageous.

As we find better cleverer ways to generate high value energy at lower cash and environmental costs, we'll gradually change our infrastructures to match.  It is all in the hands of the entrepreneurs to make the move using the research done on materials and devices mentioned above.  The consumers are ready to move away from fossil fuels as long as it doesn't affect their wallets negatively.

I think we're in a nice place to see very positive innovations in the next few years in renewable energies (beyond solar power, which is still extremely interesting and positive).

Transforming Current Cities Into Green Smart Cities

I've often spoken about decentralizing city services with technologies that could be installed in every home from solar panels to make homes energy self-sufficient, to drinking water production equipment, to wastewater recycling and so on...  I believe this is still something that will happen at some point, but I also think there are other form factors for larger city subsets like apartment blocks or integrated smart cities that could work rather well.  After all, not every area in the world has sufficient land to allow most families to have their own homes.

Thankfully, communities can use some very nice technologies to take care of the inhabitants starting with city planners.

One of my favorite ideas is based with Jacque Fresco's concepts (The Venus Project) where communities live in harmony with nature using advanced technologies and social constructs.

As far as I know though, none of M. Fresco's projects have been built according to his vision, yet.  However, China likes to experiment with interesting concepts.  One of them actually looks like one of Fresco's ideas.  The Liuzhou Forest City is planned to be built in the region of Liuzhou, Southern China where it was commissioned and the plan is that it will house approximately 30,000 residents.  

One of the main points of the city project is to take little space by building apartment complexes in height but also by making sure carbon emissions and other air pollutants would be completely absorbed by the heavily eco-green concept.  Because the Forest City has so much surface area planned to be growing with plants, it is even estimated that it will produce 900 tons of oxygen a year, likely making it very pleasant for inhabitants.

This is a great idea on its own, but if you've been following me, this sort of concept doesn't need to be built on brand new parcels of land and we could transform some of our cities with this concept without destroying any of our current buildings either.

In the video here, I talk about this a bit further:

What I mean is with the self-driven cars, delivery vehicles and public transportation systems coming out in the next 2-5 years, in most advanced societies, it is anticipated that most parking areas in cities can be re-purposed to... something else.  In some cities, 20% of the surface area is in fact parking space.  Why not growing things there instead?  Trees, plans, gardens for in-city fruit and vegetables and so on.  Those would also absorb carbon dioxide and toxins as well as producing oxygen for inhabitants.  Not to mention most of the self-driven vehicles on the street (moving, almost never parked) will be electric, which means no emissions at all.

Wouldn't that be cool to live in a green city without having to rebuild everything?  Costs and effort would be minimal wouldn't it?  An idea for you readers that happen to be interested in city planning...

While we're at it, why don't we make our shopping more efficient by having staff-less stores available to us (less people moving around to work is ecological).  I've already spoken of Amazon Go.

Here is another concept from Swedish company Wheelys, who has deployed their own self-serve store in China.  Sure we can have products delivered to us by self-driven electric delivery trucks or drones, but sometimes you just want to grab something as you walk by, or you want to touch and feel what you wish to buy this time...

Aside from removing pollution we'd still be ejecting in the air just by breathing and living, such cities would need a way to treat water at a fairly large scale, as in for apartment buildings right?  Well, one nice find from a while back is the NEWgenerator concept that takes solid and liquid waste from public or large toilet systems, treats it and spews out water you can use to water plants and solid material that can be used as fertilizer directly and bio-gas that can be used for heating and other uses where solar isn't enough.  The NEWgenerator has been designed so far for toilet blocks but no reason it cannot be restructured for other large toilet systems to serve a community.  In this instance, our water and solid waste from home could be used to feed the plants outdoors that give us nice air, fruit and vegetables.

Finally, as far as neighborhood and apartment security, we could easily use new technologies to ensure every aspect of daily life is covered from:

• walking in the tree-filled streets, by being observed by all manner of street cameras and UAVs such as those built by the Korean Aerospace Research Institute.
• apartment building entry and other semi to fully public areas, by adding facial recognition technology software to CCTV in order to identify who should be in certain places at a certain time and identifying persons of interest that have been flagged as undesirable.
• entering your own private space using your smartphone using smart lock systems.  Different models exist and you can already install those in your own home today.

Ultimately, with the freeing of all that parking space in cities, we could resolve some serious pollution problems, make our neighborhoods way more comfortable and nice to live in, and why not in the process ensure we have more efficient and smarter use of resources by recycling apartment waste into plant food?

Smart city?  Yes indeed!

3D Printed Food, Automated Farms & Lab-Grown Meat

Food and drinking water are still a serious problem for a large portion of the world's population.  For the rest of us that have easy access to both, the growth, processing and delivery of both are not very cost-effective.

In fact, just livestock production consumes 26 percent of ice-free land on Earth and each year 13 billion acres of forest is converted into new pastures and farmlands every year.

Some people have responded to this problem by becoming vegetarian.  Some do it just on the premise that animals in captivity or going to slaughter often suffer or have inadequate quality of life.

As far as water is concerned, the current issue lies with recycling wastewater back into usable water, in particular in areas of the world where drinkable water is sparse.

Thankfully, private funding and advanced scientific minds come to us with some very nice solutions.

I speak about the repercussions of the technologies mentioned below a bit further in the video below:

Water
First things to consider with water is its availability.  In many countries, drinkable water is available directly from nature.  In some other locations, it needs to be filtered or treated before we can safely drink it. 

Using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOF), scientists from the University of California, Berkeley were able to extract decent amount of drinkable water from the air.  The only thing their process needs is the MOFs, which are not used up in the process, and solar energy.  They were able to extract 2.8 liters of water in 12 hours from air with only 20-30% humidity.  That's pretty impressive.  The process required about 1 kg of MOF.  The process needs to be refined with different MOF combinations to increase the speed or efficiency of the process, enough to allow every single home on the planet to extract its own drinkable water directly from the air, without the need for any sort of treatment.  You only need the MOF component and the sun after all.  Easy peasy.

And how about our wastewater?  Well, an experimental team in Spain has designed a very easy process using electroactive bacteria that loves the organic matter in wastewater to very quickly and efficiently clean the wastewater and fuel it's own energy needs on its own.  The bacteria does that by creating electricity as they consume the waste matter in the water.  The purified water can then be sent to a pool where it can be redistributed to irrigate or be recycled to other uses.  The water is not suited for drinking but it could be reused in many ways through its reintroduction to nature's water cycle.  The current process by the team at iMETLand can convert 25,000 liters per day, enough for a small community.  This can likely be scaled up for larger communities or scaled down for individual houses with further research and testing.

Here is the process described in video:

Meat
Lab-grown meat has become pretty real these days with investors like Richard Branson endorsing the process and investing significant amounts in one of the companies that are developing such things, Memphis Meats.  Don't forget guys, humans are omnivores.  We're supposed to largely eat fruit and vegetables, but we're supposed to eat animal muscle too.

Believe it or not but 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas is attributed to livestock.  If we grew our meats in vats, we could reduce that amount by 90 percent and reduce land usage for livestock by 99%.  That's huge.  That land can then be used for lots of other things instead and we would only need animals to sample interesting cell cultures, which doesn't require us to hurt or kill the animals.  In fact, one turkey has enough cells to cultivate enough vat meat to replace several trillion turkey nuggets.  That's a lot.

Here is how it works:

The cost of a burger has already gone down from $350,000 to $11 using lab grown meats in the past 4 years and it is estimated by the investors in companies that are interested in such things that the cost of lab-grown meat will be equal to that of real meat in approximately 3 years. 

I'm pretty sure the meat won't taste as good as the real thing to start with, but we'll have full control over flavor at that point, therefore it can only get cheaper and better tasting with time.  Not to mention way more ecological.

The Chinese have also made significant investments in the technologies, promising soon we'll be seeing this type of foodstuff in supermarkets and restaurants all over the world soon enough!

3D Printed food
This is another beauty.  We already have processed foods but that food is not very healthy as most people know.  But what about 3D printed food?  Well, in principle, companies have been able to do it using core materials like calorie-free fibers to create artisanal food items that look like the real thing.  This technique can become quite popular when people need to make their own food at home at some point with full knowledge of what is exactly in the food item.  So in principle, this should be better than fast-food but just as fast, and better than processed foods as well since no preservatives or odd chemicals are needed.  Though, make no mistake, this method of making food is not as good and nutrient-rich as the real thing.  Still, very interesting way to create neat food items from designs and very interesting edible materials!

Automated Farms
Not much to say about that, but several companies, including this one, Hands Free Hectare, have started selling their solution of fully automated farms to the public.  These farms can resolve another issue we're having around food:  30% food waste.  Automated farms, connected to data based on demand from people, can possibly sow, grow and pick fruit and vegetables in exactly the right time to provide the market with what it needs based on exact demand.  We can therefore significantly reduce waste in production, shelving and transportation of food grown from these farms in the future.  Something to support and develop for sure!

I'm incredibly enthusiastic about our future as a society.  Our population increases constantly, but innovative individuals are constantly coming up with amazing solutions that resolve big issues while considering others and the technology's environmental impact.

My goal is to educate people that these technologies exist and I encourage every single person that is reading this to use these technologies and products.  Demand creates market drive.  Let's keep it going guys!

My Pet Peeve: The Dogma of the Theory of Evolution

There is something that bothers me with scientists that constantly justify observations by the book of the Theory of Evolution.  It bothers me because I feel like the word adaptation and evolution are badly used, causing confusion.  In fact, if you look at documentation, most prominently Darwin's book "On The Origin of Species", written in 1859, he ends with the Theory of Evolution, but that theory is based on creature observations at a macro level (shapes, sizes, colors, behavior, habitats and so on).  Darwin had no clue that DNA existed back in the day.

However, modern scientists, in full knowledge of DNA and how it is propagated through generations, and call any change occurring in a population "evolution", where it could just be "adaptation".

Why the confusion?  Darwin used the word "adaptation" a lot in his research, and so do many biologists, because they often observe how an animal or plant species has adapted to a different environment through what Darwin called "natural selection".

Here's my beef.  Differences in species does not automatically mean their DNA has changed into a superior state that is better adapted to an environment.  In fact, most species, humans included, have multiple balanced sets of genes that allow for adaptation to many different environments.  For example, people that live in hot regions of the world but have white skin will adapt to the heat by producing more melanin in their skin to absorb more UV light and prevent skin damage this way.  They will also feel more comfortable than other white-skinned individuals over a short period of time because their bodies, using genes in their DNA, will produce proteins that makes the heat more tolerable.  This is adaptation.

Now if this same person chooses to mate with a person with dark skin who is by default much better adapted to hot climates, the result will be a genetic mix of the two parents with features from a DNA that is better adapted to colder climates and DNA that is better adapted to warmer climate.  The offspring is a mutant, a mix of two different compatible species who may or may not be able to survive better than its parents where they live.... but at least it's an unusual mix of genes that otherwise would not have been combined.

I talk a bit more about this peeve in my video below:

It is possible that genetic errors are inserted into this new generation due to transcription errors.  In recorded human history, no transcription mutation has resulted in a human being that was better adapted to an environment, thus helping that new individual in surviving better than the others of his generation and allowing him to better propagate the mutated gene down the line.  Frankly, our history tracking genes has been too short to really know for sure.

This is why Richard Lenski started his bacteria experiment many years ago:  to see if bacteria populations (E. Coli in this case) would eventually "evolve" beneficial genes and eventually lead to an evolved E. Coli that some day may become an entirely different species as speculated by Charles Darwin.  The logic is sound for an experiment and so far it has gone through 67,000 generations.  E. Coli has only a 20 minute period per generations, so if we translate that in human years, it is similar to going through 67,000 human generations, which means 1,340,000 human years.

To put it in perspective, the expectation here is that the bacteria changed genetically just as much as human beings within those generations.  We think the first member of the "Homo" genus appeared 2,800,000 years ago from a more primitive form, the Hominids, starting with Homo Habilis.

There is excitement around the Lenski experiment because a couple years ago, one of the cultures has started to gain the ability to eat citrate instead of just glucose.  That and all 12 original cultures have changed and have different characteristics than what they started off with even though their environment hasn't changed.  It is a fascinating experiment, really.

Honestly, it seems insufficient for a bacteria to only have one beneficial DNA mutation over all those generations and within the same amount of generations, humans have gone from Homo Habilis to modern day humans.  Homo habilis and its more advanced cousin, homo erectus, were significantly less advanced in brain capacity and ability to move about than homo sapiens (us).  It just doesn't compute to me.

What the reports and documents don't show is whether these changes are due to mutations within the populations or simply adaptation using the genetic code available within the flasks.  DNA is complex with genes responsible for coding protein, regulator genes, DNA responsible to help pack and unpack chromosomes (structural DNA) and more.  We don't know yet if those changes seen in the E. Coli colonies were just existing genes unlocking in the right sequence allowing for citrate processing, or if it's a real beneficial mutation.  We're just now gaining the right tools to just start to determine this sort of thing.

I don't keep the secret that I'm a believer of the Intelligent Design theory.  Don't worry, I don't believe in any mysterious all powerful being that happen to be there to create life.  I just think, given the facts, it makes more sense that very different species were designed by scientists a long time ago and what we see as leaps in the genealogical trees of evolutionary species are just different attempts in lab work, with the Earth being the lab.

There is no proof of this of course.  It is something I believe makes more sense than abiogenesis plus massive fast evolutionary jumps between versions of species. 

It just looks a lot more like new versions after an update and until there is proof that such jumps are possible through random beneficial mutations over a reasonable amount of generations, I will continue to believe an intelligent hand must have been involved to explain the bones we dig up in our soil.

Many deist professionals are also strong believers of Intelligent Design, but they celebrate the issues with evolutionist proofs by just saying, "it must be God".  There is no proof of that either.

Fortunately, some of these researchers do make good points in favor of Intelligent Design while trying to prove their god-theory, like this excellent writer that explains that it would be very difficult to explain how come over 80% of our DNA is actually useful and retained over so many random mutation generations.

I just think there is a severe lack of doubt in the scientific community surrounding the Theory of Evolution and wish my colleagues would keep a more open mind about different possibilities that we may not be able to prove yet (such as the ancient presence of extraterrestrial scientists on the planet that would have left a long, long time ago).

These scientists speak about evolution as if it was a certainty and being considered experts, creates certainty within the general population and then this certainty then infiltrates our schools.

Doubt is the basis of science because it raises questions and that's good.

So, dear reader, the next time you hear some explanation about some animal behavior or newfound species by the blanket answer "it must have evolved this way ....".  Think about what I just wrote here.  Evolution is like dogma these days, but it is far from being the only way life could have appeared on the planet so long ago.

Food for thought.