Three years ago, a team of MIT researchers were able to create virus-built anodes, engineering the viruses to coat themselves in cobalt oxide and gold before assembling together into a nanowire. The missing piece was to create the cathode. The problem lay in the fact that most candidate materials were not highly conductive to permit the flow of electrons. The newest MIT group to approach this challenge realized that the viruses engineered to coat themselves in iron phosphate and then attach to a conductive carbon nanotube would solve the problem.
The viruses are non-harmful to humans (bacteriophages only infect bacteria) and the battery manufacturing process uses all non-toxic checmicals. Not only is the process environmentally benign, it is also inexpensive. Further, the batteries permit a great deal of plasticity in their design as the anode and cathodes can be organically constructed to fit the shape of the container.
The next step is the pursuit of materials such as manganese phosphate and nickel phosphate to allow higher voltage and capacitance. The current prototype is only a typical coin-size battery and is limited to the use of about 100 times. Future projects hope to break the use limitations and increase the size. The aims of these researchers are ultimately set for green car batteries.
2 comments:
Neato completo. Although, of all the viruses I know about, bacteriophages are by far the creepiest. It gives me some sick satisfaction to see them manipulated and used to benefit us. Did you read the original article in the MIT newsletter? Not that it has anything additional to say on this topic, but there is another article about Game Theory applied to the behavior of yeast when it is forced to either cooperate or take advantage in adverse conditions. They try to relate it to a the evolutionary question about cooperativeness being advantageous... it's actually kinda funny if you see how it mirrors our own behavior.
I read about this from MIT's Technology Review. I tend to find things both there and in their "news office." I didn't see that about game theory with regard to yeast. I'll have to check that out.
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