A team of researchers led by Stephan Kohler of the Graz University of Technology in Austria have completed tests showing that sea shells can remove heavy metal pollution from water.

The researchers have cleansed water in Vietnam’s Saigon River, which was tainted with toxic metals like cadmium, zinc, lead and iron from factories on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, using nothing but sea shells  Being able to combat water pollution with such a cheap material could save millions of lives in coastal cities throughout the developing world.

Kohler’s team has found that crushed clam or mussel shells, which are made of aragonite (a form of calcium carbonate),  readily swap out calcium atoms in favour of heavy metals, locking them into a solid form.

The effect ceases, and the shells start leeching out the metals, if the water becomes acidic - but, because the shells are naturally basic, all you have to do to reverse the leeching out is to add more shells.

While developed  countries, which can afford them, use more sophisticated filtration techniques, coastal communities in the developing world could greatly reduce the public health risk posed by toxic heavy metals in their water supplies using shells like cockle, mussel and clam which are available in large quantities as a waste product of the seafood industry.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

John Wellinghoff, the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has told a U.S. Energy Association forum.that no new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States,

"We may not need any, ever," Mr Wellinghoff said. Renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

"I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism," he said. "Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind’s going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you’ll dispatch that first."

He added, "People talk about, ‘Oh, we need baseload.’ It’s like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don’t need mainframes, we have distributed computing."

"What you have to do, is you have to be able to shape it," he added. "And if you can shape wind and you can effectively get capacity available for you for all your loads.

"So if you can shape your renewables, you don’t need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time. And, in fact, most plants running all the time in your system are an impediment because they’re very inflexible. You can’t ramp up and ramp down a nuclear plant. And if you have instead the ability to ramp up and ramp down loads in ways that can shape the entire system, then the old concept of baseload becomes an anachronism."

"I think it’s being settled by the digital grid moving forward," he said. "We are going to have to go to a smart grid to get to this point I’m talking about."

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Print Recovery Concepts in Maine is manufacturing laser printer toner made using soybean oil rather than petroleum products.

One of the biggest distributors of soy-based toner cartridges is LaserMonksGreen, a web site operated by Cistercian monks. As well as funding their abbey, the monks donate $1 to hunger relief, plant a tree in Brazil and say a prayer for their customer every time they sell a cartridge. Their cartridges cost 20% less than the Hewlett-Packard equivalent.

According to Associated Press, recent tests involving identical documents from two identical printers — one with a new Hewlett-Packard cartridge and the other a soy cartridge — produced indistinguishable printouts, equally dark and smudge-proof.

Although soy-based ink is being used successfully in book, magazine and newspaper printing, Hewlett-Packard, which derives much of its profit from petroleum-based toners and inks, told Associated Press that its research suggested that bio-based materials "have not met HP’s high-performance standards and may not be appropriate for many printing applications."

At present, soy-based toners are only available for HP printers. Colour toners and cartridges for other brands of printer are being developed. There is no equivalent for ink-jet cartridges.

We have not been able to find an Australian distributor of soy cartridges. If you know know of one, please let us know in the Comments below.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Internet security company McAfee has released a report which says that 62 trillion junk emails were sent in 2008. Spam makes up around 97 percent of all email traffic.

McAfee estimates that the electricity wasted by this much junk email would be sufficient to power 2.4 million US homes.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

KLD Energy Technologies, an electric engine company based in Texas, has developed an new electric motor which it believes will overcome the disappointing performance and high price of electric scooters produced to date.

The company has built an engine using nano-crystalline composite materials, which it says is ten times more efficient than traditional iron core motors. The cost of magnets made from the material has dropped from $4 to $5 ten years ago to around 20 cents today.

KLD has contracted with Sufat Co Ltd, Vietnam’s largest scooter manufacturer, to produce scooters using its motor.  Sufat is planning to build 50,000 of the scooters next year.

The companies say that the scooters will have a top speed of 125 kilometres per hour and will accelerate to 80 kilometres per hour in less than 10 seconds. They will be able to take a variety of bateries and their range will depend on the batery chosen.

Scooters with comparable performance currently cost around $US11,000. KLD expects its new scooters to sell for about $US1,500.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

John Waters, the engineer who invented the battery pack system for the EV1 electric vehicle, which was famously scrapped by General Motors in 1999, has launched his own electric vehicle company called Bright Automotive.

Bright Automotive plans to have an extended-range electric delivery van in production by 2012 and to be turning out 50,000 vehicles a year by 2013.

The van, to be called the Idea, will have more than 5 cubic metres of cargo space, a 900 kilogram payload and an 80 kilometre all-electric range, An electric motor will drive the rear wheels and a petrol motor, driving the front wheels, will take over when the battery runs low.

The company’s plans depend on securing a $450 million from the US Department of Energy.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Leading automotive and energy companies have reached agreement on a common "plug" to recharge electric cars.

Car manufacturers including Volkswagen, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Fiat, Toyota and Mitsubishi and energy companies including Eon, Vattenfall, EDF, Npower, Endesa and Enel have agreed on a three-point, 400-volt plug. The higher voltage plug will allow vehicles to be recharged much more quickly than common 110 to 240-volt outlets.

The agreement on a standard plug is regarded as a major step towards the mass production of electric cars, particularly for Europe, where cars will need to be able to be recharged on different national electricity systems.

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons anounced that they had demonstrated the production of excess heat during electrolysis with palladium cathodes in heavy water. The phenomenon was dubbed "cold fusion" and their claims were quickly dismissed.

However, many laboratories have since repeated their expeiments. Although most have failed, a few have reported success. A 2007 review determined that more than 10 groups world wide reported measurements of excess heat in a third of their experiments. Most of the research groups reported occasionally seeing 50-200% excess heat for periods lasting hours or days.

If the production of excess heat is real, it could be a source of cheap, pollution-free energy.

The American "60 Minutes" has produced the following review of the current state the science:

Watch CBS Videos Online

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s biggest energy utility, has signed an agreement to buy 200 megawatts of solar energy to be beamed down from space.

The company is now seeking approval from California’s Public Utilities Commission for the deal with Solaren Corp. Solaren would generate the power using solar panels in Earth orbit. The energy would be converted to radio-frequency transmissions that would be beamed down to a receiving station in Fresno, California. The radio energy would then be converted into electricity and fed into the power grid. Solaren belives that the power could be supplied at a price which would be "competitive both in terms of performance and cost with other sources of baseload power generation."

Solaren’s chief executive officer, Gary Spirnak, said that "While a system of this scale and exact configuration has not been built, the underlying technology is very mature and is based on communications satellite technology,"

He said that he was confident his company would be able to deliver the power starting in mid-2016, as specified in the agreement and that "There are huge penalties associated with not performing."

(Based on sources including MSNBC)

If you found this item interesting, please let others know:

Santa Monica City in Los Angeles County has a number of community gardens but demand for space in them has become so great that residents are forced to wait an average of five years before a plot becomes available.

Several ideas for creating more space, including using school grounds, rooftops and existing parks, were considered but it was felt that the conversion process would be slow and would not create much additional garden space.

The solution that the City officials have come up with is to establish a :"frontyard and backyard registry". Homeowners who have yards which they are unable or unwilling to maintain properly would register them as being available for other residents who would like to do gardening but don’t have the space.

Although the original idea was to enable people to grow vegetables, the registry would also allow homeowners to make space available for gardeners who wanted to grow flowers. 

(Based on sources including the Los Angeles Times.)

If you found this item interesting, please let others know: