Category: Plants & Technology
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Hydrofracking, A Plant From India, And Why Ice Cream Is Threatened
A sudden demand for an obscure substance with an odd name – guar gum – has companies whose products range from vanilla ice cream to black gold checking Indian weather reports and their own bottom lines
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Scientists Turn To Plants For Novel Morphing Materials
New method for producing composite materials from a variety of materials that adopt a pre-programmed shape autonomously.
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Plants Offer Designers Model To Trap Bedbugs
A material designed to mimic the hooked hairs found on leaves could help trap and control bedbugs.
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Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell: Electricity From Marshes
An unexpected source of new, clean energy has been found: the Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell that can generate electricity from the natural interaction between living plant roots and soil bacteria.
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Cultivating Plants To Mine For Rare Metals
Fields of native flowers may soon become high tech nanoparticle factories if a team of scientists in the United Kingdom succeeds in using plants to extract soil pollutants which bacteria will then process into useful materials.
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The New Mushroom House: Be Your Own Garden Gnome
Mycologist Philip Ross is seriously into mushrooms, but not as a food — instead, he uses fungi as a building material.
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Plants Teach MIT Researchers How To Build Things
From an engineer’s perspective, plants such as palm trees, bamboo, maples and even potatoes are examples of precise engineering on a microscopic scale. Like wooden beams reinforcing a house, cell walls make up the structural supports of all plants. Depending on how the cell walls are arranged, and what they are made of, a plant […]
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Fir Trees May Replace “Whale Vomit” In Perfumes
His lab's discovery of a much more efficient process using the balsam fir gene could mean that production of a plant-based substitute could be both cheaper and more sustainable than ambergris collection.”Certainly you would not have to go back anymore to pick up whale barf off of the beaches
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Bacteria Stunner: Sewage In, Electricity Out.
A fuel cell powered by naturally occurring bacteria has successfully converted 13 per cent of the energy in sewage to electricity — and cleaned the waste water at the same time. It's hoped genetic engineering could make this much more efficient.
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A New Way To "Light Up:" Tobacco As Biofuel!
The leaves would then be crushed, and the fuel extracted and separated. The scientists estimate that about 1000 acres of tobacco could yield more than one million gallons of fuel.