Bosavi giant woolly rat.
A Smithsonian Institution biologist, working with the Natural History Unit of the BBC, has discovered a new species of giant rat on a filmmaking expedition to a remote rainforest in New Guinea. The discovery was made in the crater of an extinct volcano named Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea’s Southern Highlands province. This gigantic volcano’s crater is two and half miles wide and rimmed with walls nearly half a mile high, trapping the creatures inside a “lost world” of mountain rainforests probably rarely visited by humans.
Weighing nearly 3.5 pounds, and measuring 32 inches from nose to tail, the Bosavi woolly rat is one of the biggest rats in the world. Most surprising was that the rat was completely tame, a sign that animals in the isolated crater were unfamiliar with humans. “It is a true rat, closely related to the rats and mice most of us are familiar with, but so much bigger,” said Helgen.
The gigantic rat is silvery gray, with thick woolly fur. It has a vegetarian diet of leaves and roots, and probably builds underground nests beneath rocks and tree roots. A member of the genus Mallomys, it has yet to receive its formal scientific name.
Inside this white building, piles of sorghum are broken down into acids. The acids they produce can be used to make gasoline.
A company that has developed a process for converting organic waste and other biomass into gasoline–Terrabon, based in Houston–recently announced a partnership with Waste Management, the giant garbage-collection and -disposal company based in Houston. The partnership could help Terrabon bring its technology to market.
Most biofuels companies fall into one of two categories. Some use enzymes to break down biomass into simple sugars and a single organism to convert sugars into fuel, such as yeast. Others use high temperatures and pressure to break biomass down into basic chemical building blocks–carbon monoxide and hydrogen–which are then chemically processed into fuels. Terrabon has developed a process that combines the two. It uses a naturally occurring mixture of organisms to convert biomass, not into fuels, but into carboxylic acids. These can be converted into fuel and other chemicals using well-known chemical processes. Gary Luce, the company’s CEO, says Terrabon’s fuels can compete with petroleum-based fuels if prices are above $75 a barrel. (The price of oil is currently about $70 a barrel.)
The approach has an advantage over single-organism-based methods because the mixture of organisms used, collected from salt marshes, are adapted to survive in the wild. They don’t require the special sterile environments needed to prevent single-organism cultures from being contaminated, which brings down the cost of equipment.
These organisms naturally break down biomass into carboxylic acids, such as acetic acid, the key component of vinegar. These acids can serve as chemical precursors for a wide variety of chemicals and fuels, including gasoline and diesel, via processing steps that convert the acids into ketones and alcohols. The acids can be made without the expensive equipment required for high-pressure and -temperature processes. They can also then be processed into fuels using equipment at existing refineries, helping keep costs down.
The New Hairy Solar Panel
A new type of solar panel using human hair could provide the world with cheap, green electricity, believes its teenage inventor. Milan Karki, 18, who comes from a village in rural Nepal, believes he has found the solution to the developing world’s energy needs. The young inventor says hair is easy to use as a conductor in solar panels and could revolutionise renewable energy.
The hair replaces silicon, a pricey component typically used in solar panels, and means the panels can be produced at a low cost for those with no access to power, he explained. Milan and four classmates initially made the solar panel as an experiment but the teens are convinced it has wide applicability and commercial viability.
The solar panel, which produces 9 V (18 W) of energy, costs around £23 to make from raw materials. But if they were mass-produced, Milan says they could be sold for less than half that price, which could make them a quarter of the price of those already on the market.
Melanin, a pigment that gives hair its colour, is light sensitive and also acts as a type of conductor. Because hair is far cheaper than silicon the appliance is less costly. The solar panel can charge a mobile phone or a pack of batteries capable of providing light all evening. Milan began his quest to create electricity when he was a boy living in Khotang, a remote district of Nepal completely unconnected to electricity. According to him, villagers were skeptical of his invention at first.
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