From the category archives:

science

Generating Energy From Crap - Literally

by golbguru on February 15, 2007

Presenting a frugal, efficient, and an environmentally friendly answer to all our energy problems: generation of energy from crap :) . Sounds funny, but this interesting approach to efficient energy production and waste management has been put to practical use in many countries.

Heard about biogas before? If you haven’t, this will serve as a primer for you. According to Wikipedia, the term biogas refers to:

a (biofuel) gas produced by the anaerobic digestion or fermentation of organic matter including manure, sewage sludge, municipal solid waste, biodegradable waste or any other biodegradable feedstock..

If you take out the scientific jargon from that definition, it simply means that biogas is a fuel produced by treating animal or human waste under certain conditions. A schematic of this process is shown in the image below.

Basic biogas generation concept

Here is a brief explanation about the process. Degradable animal (cow dung is hugely popular) and human waste is fed to the biogas generator through some kind of an inlet pipe. The generator is usually a large sized, dome shaped container that holds the waste in an oxygen-free environment. The waste is held there till it ferments (usually in a couple of weeks) and produces the desired gas (mainly a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide). The gas is then refined if necessary and directed towards where ever it’s required (usually for cooking or heating purposes). The residual waste from the generator is mostly used as an organic fertilizer. So basically, you start with crap and end with free heating/cooking and free soil fertilizer…how frugal is that! :) You can read the details here, here, here, and here.

After the initial capital costs of installing the generator, the system essentially produces free gas for use….you just have to keep producing organic waste. If large communities come together and plan on installing and maintaining ‘bulk’ systems, even the capital costs per person (per family) could be reduced. Apart from the cost advantages, there are numerous environmental advantages like these (source):

Biogas production by anaerobic digestion is popular for treating biodegradable waste because valuable fuel can be produced while destroying disease-causing pathogens and reducing the volume of disposed waste products. The methane in biogas combusts more cleanly than coal, and produces more energy with less emissions of carbon dioxide. The harvesting of biogas is an important role of waste management because methane is a greenhouse gas with a greater global warming potential than carbon dioxide. The carbon in biogas was generally recently extracted from the atmosphere by photosynthetic plants, so releasing it back into the atmosphere adds less total atmospheric carbon than the burning of fossil fuels.

Is this new stuff?

Nopes, according to one website:

Biogas has been known since Ancient times. The Assyrians used it to heat their bath water. From 1895, the city of Exeter in England had street lighting fuelled by biogas produced from a methanisation unit installed at the town’s water purifying plant.

India, China, and some European Union countries are getting heavily into technologies related to this concept.

I haven’t heard about any such stuff in US except rare use of terms like “Biomass Program” and rare news like this; is there a good reason why this is not popular here? Is it just lack of publicity ? Or are we just too rich and sophisticated (and careless) to explore the potential of crap? With 300 million people, that’s a lot of crap wasted.

May be this will give some encouragement to the idea :) :

Free gas from crap station

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Shopping Urges Related To Your Brain; Good News For Spenders… And Advertisers

by golbguru on January 4, 2007

brain2More than a month ago, I posted this article on human spending addiction “There Should Be A Pill To Make People Stop Spending” and tried to relate gambling and shopping with conditions of the brain. I am happy to note that more people are making that connection :) as this article from BBC suggests. According to the article, researchers have now identified a specific area in the brain that “wants the stuff” and another area that “doesn’t want to spend”; and have observed that the decision to buy or not to buy is a trade-off between the two.
This is good news for those with compulsive spending tendencies because with this kind of understanding, designing a anti-spending pill will become easier.
Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

If the volunteer wanted the product, a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens lit up.

Then, when the price appeared, a high price activated a part called the insula, and deactivated other parts.

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They said that the study could reveal how credit cards ‘trick’ the brain into buying more.

They wrote: “This finding has implications for understanding behavioural anomalies, such as consumers’ growing tendency to overspend and under save when purchasing with credit cards rather than cash.”

I am a bit wary of this claim…I have always associated higher credit card spending to lack of self control (read discipline) and lack of common sense. But may be the lack of self control is because of the mind-games our brain plays with us. That being said, it would be nice if they identify the brain area that affects common sense :).

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He said: “Human financial behaviour is often seemingly irrational, a fact that provides employment for advertisers, casino workers, insurance salesmen, and economists.”

He said that it might be possible to understand more about compulsive shoppers and gamblers by spotting problems in the brain areas revealed by the scans.

Btw, I also see a very obvious unwanted consequence of this research. Such a finding will be immediately exploited by the advertisers, casino workers, insurance salesmen, and economists (and credit card companies…if we go along with what they are saying) and a whole lot of people are going to end up spending a lot more. Advertisers will start targeting the “nucleus accumbens” of your brain to make you spend more and personal finance bloggers will keep appealing to your “insula” to make you spend less. Man that sounds like fun. :)

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Vulcan, The God of Fire

by golbguru on September 1, 2006

People familiar with the word ‘vulcanization’ will instantly attribute it to Charles Goodyear (in whose honor the Goodyear Tire Company named itself).

It is common knowledge that vulcanization involves heating rubber to a high temperature with certain desirable additives, most notably sulphur, to improve its mechanical and chemical properties and make it more usable.

It is not very common knowledge that the word ‘vulcanization’ originates from ‘Vulcan’ the greek god of fire.

The same fire god is also responsible for the origin of the word ‘volcano’ .

Interestingly, he is fabled to be proficient in the art of metalworking.

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The Cold Geysers of Enceladus

by golbguru on September 1, 2006

The discovery of ‘potential’ liquid water on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, by the Cassini spacecraft, is one of the most important discoveries in the history of space exploration. To read more about it, visit: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=639

For the techno-nerdy, more on Cassini can be found on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini-Huygens

I think, the term ‘potential’ will linger around this discovery as a prefix, till someone actually sends a vehicle to land on the moon and physically collect some liquid water or some other proof of it’s existence (life?). This may take an awful amount of time and money considering that it takes about seven years for a one-way journey to Saturn.

Anyways, for those devoted to the extra-terrestrial search, this will be a shot in the arm. Liquid water has always been associated with the existence of life forms (according to the current extent of our knowledge (or ignorance !)). However, by the looks of Enceladus, they would be more interested in looking for microbial life instead of some three-eyed, super-elastic, saucer-flying monsters.

Till that time, lets just hope that this is not a false alarm raised/hyped in the hopes of increasing the government funding for NASA’s future missions.

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Working Under Pressure

by golbguru on September 1, 2006

I just landed my eyes on an MSNBC article about NASA : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11712516/
Especially, the last part of it which says
“After a ceiling lamp broke, showering glass onto the shuttle, workers used a boom-mounted platform to position themselves for cleaning up the debris. However, while moving into position, the edge of the work platform made contact with the shuttle’s robot arm, which is stowed along the left sill of the long payload bay.
Inspections are now under way to verify that no mechanical damage was inflicted on the arm or on the special sensors that have been installed for testing on the next mission. MSNBC.com has been told privately that such operator errors seem to have become more frequent in recent weeks as workers do double-shifts to meet the schedule for launch processing.”

This somehow reminds me of the Hubble Space Telescope project. People, working hard to beat deadlines and ridiculous budgets, did similar things on the Hubble project and almost ruined the telescope’s mirror at least a couple of times.

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