Technology borrows a lot of inspiration from nature. The first flying machines tried to flap their wings like birds, for instance, and we’re still trying to get robots that walk as naturally as humans. Now, Panasonic has borrowed a page out of Mother Nature’s book and developed what it believes to be a “highly efficient artificial photosynthesis system.”

Taking you back to high school biology class, photosynthesis is the process by which plants and similar organisms are able to take carbon dioxide and some sunlight, converting it into organic materials and usable energy. The Panasonic system works in much the same way, except it’s completely artificial. The system is achieving a top efficiency of just 0.2%, but that’s comparable with real plants used for biomass energy.

One of the more obvious applications here is in places where the system can capture and convert wasted carbon dioxide from industrial activities. Carbon dioxide is implicated in both the depletion of fossil fuels and the increase in the greenhouse effect. The artificial photosynthesis is effectively able to do both of those in reverse, generating “new” organic materials while reducing CO2 emissons. A big part of the Panasonic system is the use of a nitride semiconductor, which has “the capability to excite the electrons with enough energy for the CO2 reduction reaction.”

No, this isn’t exactly “green” energy and it doesn’t nullify all the bad things that industry does to the environment, but through systems like Panasonic’s artifical photosynthesis, at least that impact is reduced.

[Source]

The post Synthetic Photosynthesis System Developed by Panasonic appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The diagnosis of most particular types of disease is a time-consuming process. But that’s going to change in the future thanks to a new breathalyzer-like technology that is currently under development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The researchers there believe that the tech could be used to diagnose a wide range of diseases including cancer and diabetes.

The human body reacts differently to different conditions. It is capable of shifting between energy sources when required.

According to Warren Porter, a UW-Madison professor of zoology, “When we’re healthy we use the food that we eat. When we get sick, the immune system takes over the body and starts tearing apart proteins to make antibodies and use them as an energy source“.

This shift between energy sources leads to different biochemical pathways. As a result, there will be changes in the carbon isotopes in the exhaled CO2. The “breathalyzer” will be used to detect these changes in isotopic signatures of carbon-containing metabolic by-products.

One of the main advantages of such a system will be the early detection of diseases. Diseases could be diagnosed well before symptoms start to show up. As you already know, early detection is very important when it comes to diseases such as cancer. And the use of a single technique to survey the entire body will also simplify diagnosis to a great extent.

The research on the technique was done on mice which were injected with glucose containing a single atom of carbon-13. This was done to detect the most active metabolic pathways in sick and healthy mice. They found out that there were changes in the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 in the exhaled CO2 by the healthy and sick mice. Furthermore, different ratios were detected for different diseases.

At the moment, the “breathalyzer” is about the size of a shoebox, but they are planning to make it smaller. Head here to know more about the study.

[ source ]

The post Metabolic Breathalyzer Will Detect Diseases Early appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The infographic embedded here comes by way of Geekaphone and it outlines some enviro-minded factoids on the iPhone for you to consider. For example, of the 45kg of CO2 pumped out as a result of the iPhone 4, 57% comes from production and 35% comes from consumer use. The sad thing is that consumers aren’t really doing their part with less than 10% of phones being recycled.

There are over two million cell phones entering landfills each week, since the average life span of a phone is less than 18 months. This results in 65,000 tons of toxic waste (equivalent to three small oil tankers) being dumped at the dump each year.

What about Apple? While the reduced packaging has done some good (14% fuel savings), it’s still scary to think that 30 companies on 3 continents are responsible for the iPhone, including 300,000 workers in China earning less than $10 a day. That opens another can of worms altogether, but it’s still worth knowing as you download another fart app and stream another video on Crackle.

The post Earth Day: Is The Apple iPhone Green? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Blight on the landscape, or awesome improvement on mother nature?

Influx Studio has designed synthetic trees that are capable of removing carbon dioxide from the air and releasing oxygen. Mario Caceres and Christian Canonico of Influx Studio envision the trees in urban landscapes all over Boston, helping clean the air “branch” by branch.

The treepods will work by utilizing an eco-friendly, alkaline resin which reacts with the air around it and strips the air of carbon dioxide. The clean air will float away happily. The treepods will be made entirely of recycled plastic from drink bottles.

As part of the design, the trees are attached to each other to form clumps, or treepods, which the team hopes will encourage people to gather under them and help power the trees. To maximize the tree’s efficiency, the treepods will partly power themselves with the solar energy they generate through panels on top of the trees. The team found that solar power on its own wasn’t enough to power the trees, so the trees would be placed in pods and joined together by see-saws and hammocks.

Some might ask, what’s wrong with normal trees? They are nature’s lungs, aren’t they? Well, treepods don’t require soil or water and can be placed in areas that don’t support tree growth, like in heavily-polluted cities plagued by smog.

Influx Studio was inspired by Dr Klaus Lackner, the Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. He in turn was inspired by his daughter’s 8th grade science fair project that extracted CO2 from the air by using a fish tank pump and a battery.

Whether you think the trees are awesome or an eye-sore, they have the potential to help clean up the air in polluted city centres.There has been no word on whether the treepods will actually make their way to Boston.

[SHIFT Boston]

The post CO2 Scrubbing Fake Trees Might Roll In To Boston appeared first on Mobile Magazine.