25 Dec 2009 in Science

Bad wine makes for good energy

 

Credit: Peter Mautsch
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Bad wine makes for good energy
Featured in MSNBC: December 15, 2009

A bad bottle of wine could drop your electrical and gas bills. Using widely available microbes, scientists in the United States and India are turning the unused sugar and unwanted vinegar resulting from improper fermentation into electricity and hydrogen. The technology could provide a new and cost effective way to clean wastewater from wineries and get some value out of a bad bottle of wine. “There is nothing special about the bacteria,” said Bruce Logan, a scientist at Penn State University who recently installed a microbial electrolysis cell at a winery in Napa Valley, Calif. “We just give them a good environment to grow in.” While Logan uses a microbial electrolysis cell to split water, a group of scientists from India recently developed a microbial fuel cell that uses wine to produce energy. “Sugars like glucose, alcohols and effluents containing sugars or alcohols can be used (to produce electricity),” said Sheela Berchmans, a professor at the Central Electrochemical Research Institute in India, who recently co-authored a paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

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22 Dec 2009 in Science

2009 Science News of the Year: Matter & Energy

First programmable quantum computer
Ultracold beryllium ions are at the heart of the first programmable quantum computer, an advance that brings scientists closer to harnessing the power of quantum systems for general computing. The new system, researchers report in Nature Physics, flexed its versatility by performing 160 randomly chosen processing routines (SN: 12/19/09, p. 13). 

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., based their quantum computer on two beryllium ions chilled to just above absolute zero. These ions, trapped by an electromagnetic field on a gold-plated alumina chip, formed the quantum bits, or qubits, analogous to the bits in regular computers represented by 0s and 1s. Short laser bursts manipulated the beryllium ions to perform the processing operations, while nearby magnesium ions kept the beryllium ions cool (SN Online: 8/6/09).

On average, the quantum computer performed the 160 programs accurately 79 percent of the time. The new study is “a powerful demonstration of the technological advances towards producing a real-world quantum computer,” says quantum physicist Winfried Hensinger of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.

Macroworld entanglement
Scientists have found traces of quantum weirdness lurking between two superconductors (white squares on gray, below) that are visible to the naked eye (SN: 10/24/09, p. 12). Another team has linked vibrations of two separated atom pairs, entangling a system that approaches the scale of everyday life (SN: 7/4/09, p. 8).

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