Scientists Have Created Bio-Rocket Fuel

For those of you concerned that rockets, jet fighters and the like aren't environmentally friendly, some good news: scientists have worked out how to use bacteria to create rocket fuel.

A team of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Joint BioEnergy Institute have genetically engineered a version of E. Coli that is capable of producing pinene. That's a hydrocarbon produced by trees that could potentially replace high-energy fuels such as JP-10, which is currently used in many jet engines and rockets. The research is published in ACS Synthetic Biology.

The team inserted enzymes from trees into the bacterium in order to create the pinene-producing bugs. Pinene is particularly energy-dense, just like jet fuels—where the weight saving of cramming more calories into the same volume of liquid is a significant bonus.

There's still some way to go before all the jets, rockets and missiles in the world are fuelled through biological means, though. The bacteria currently only produce 32 milligrams of fuel per liter of glucose that they're fed on—which is far from efficient.

But the good news is that the process doesn't need to become crazily cost-effective to succeed. While producing biofuel replacements for something like diesel needs to compete at a price point of around $3 a gallon, rocket fuel represents a much smaller fraction of the crude oil from which it's derived, so it's more like $25 per gallon.

So, while there's still a need to boost production rates—and the team wants to increase it by a factor of 26—there's not quite the same urgency to make it incredibly cheap. But regardless of price, at least high-energy fuels will be a little more green in the future. [ACS Synthetic Biologyvia Phys.Org]

Image by Randy Merrill under Creative Commons license

Comments

Einstein’s Lost Theory Describes a Universe Without a Big Bang

Einstein with Edwin Hubble, in 1931, at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, looking through the lens of the 100-inch telescope through which Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929. Courtesy of the Archives, Calif Inst of Technology. In 1917, a year after Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was published—but still two years before he would become the international celebrity we know—Einstein chose to tackle the entire universe . For anyone else, this might seem an exceedingly ambitious task—but this was Einstein. Einstein began by applying his field equations of gravitation to what he considered to be the entire universe. The field equations were the mathematical essence of his general theory of relativity, which extended Newton’s theory of gravity to realms where speeds approach that of light and masses are very large. But his math was better than he wanted to believe—...

There’s a Previously Undiscovered Organ in Your Body, And It Could Explain How Cancer Spreads

Ever heard of the interstitium? No? That’s OK, you’re not alone — scientists hadn’t either. Until recently. And, hey, guess what — you’ve got one! The interstitium is your newest organ. Scientists identified it for the first time because they are better able to observe living tissues at a microscopic scale, according to a recent study published in Scientific Reports , Scientists had long believed that connective tissue surrounding our organs was a thick, compact layer. That’s what they saw when they looked at it in the lab, outside the body, at least. But in a routine endoscopy (exploration of the gastrointestinal tract), a micro camera revealed something unexpected: When observed in a living body, the connective tissue turned out to be “an open, fluid-filled space supported by a lattice made of thick collagen bundles,” pathologist and study author Neil Theise told Research Gate . This network of channels is present throughout ...

First light-bending calculator designed with metamaterials

Exotic materials that bend light in extreme ways could be used to perform complex mathematical operations, creating a new kind of analogue computer. Tools for manipulating light waves have taken off in recent years thanks to the development of metamaterials . These materials have complex internal structures on scales smaller than the wavelength of the light they interact with, and so they produce unusual effects. Most famously, metamaterials promise to deliver " invisibility cloaks " that can route light around an object, making it seem to disappear. Nader Engheta at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his colleagues decided to explore a different use for metamaterials, one that adapts the old idea of analogue computing . Today's digital computers are based on electrical switches that are either on or off. But before these machines were analogue computers based on varying electrical or mechanical properties. The slide rule is one example...

Aestus Ajith

Search This Blog