Chloé Sharrocks

Unilever, the company responsible for the ice-cream brands Ben & Jerry’s and Wall’s have come up with a new way to help save the planet.

The FMCG giant has decided to make a low-carbon ice creame which will only be frozen when shoppers take the product home.  Instead the ice cream will be transported and sold at room temperature, meaning that Unilever will be reducing their carbon footprint by saving on refrigerated transportation, as well as reducing their energy costs.

Image of Cherry Garcia ice cream, copyright of Don.chulio, published on Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

The food scientists haven’t yet unveiled how they’re going to produce this ‘ambient’ ice cream whilst still maintaining the fab taste that consumers will expect at a reasonable price

According to Marketing Magazine, the research is part of a wider plan of Unilever’s to reduce the environmental impact of their brands and the product is being undertaken in partnership with academics at Cambridge University.

I’ve never understood why people dislike the appearance of wind farms so much.  Maybe it’s just I’m a bit of a fan of modern architecture anyways, but to me there is nothing obtrusive about the view of turbines over the British countryside (although I can understand concerns with noise etc if built too close to people’s homes) and I often wonder if they looked a bit more like windmills, if they wouldn’t be more welcomed.

Thankfully, however, developments in wind turbine technology have allowed the very first world’s floating wind turbine to be created out at sea.  ‘Hywind’ is the name of the floating turbine which is shortly to be towed out to sea just off the coast of Norway.  Like other future floating wind turbines, it will be connected to mainland grids via cables run along the sea bed.  However, this can be expensive – the longer the cable, the more costly – and is likely to be a restrictive factor.  But, wind turbines out of sea offer a wealth of advantages – stronger and more consistent wind, no problems for bird life and tourism and benefits for military radar operations and the shipping industry.  What’s more, the offshore wind farms will be out-of-sight for those people who feel they are a blight on the landscape.

A more traditional static off-shore wind turbine

The Hywind is capable of generating 2.3 megawatts (enough to power approximately 1600 homes for a year) and will be tested for 2 years.  Like an iceberg, it is partly hidden below the sea – with a 100 metre draft anchored to the sea bed with cables as long as 700 metres.  Although, such floating turbines are currently more expensive than static offshore installations, it is hoped that over time as the technology becomes more common-place the price will fall in-line with the static turbines.

It is hoped that floating wind farms can later be established off the coasts of North America, the Iberian peninsula and the UK as well as further developments of the coasts of Norway.

Yesterday I went to the free Ecobuild 2009 exhibition at Earls Court, London where I learnt about how sheep in the attic can help make your homes more eco-friendly.

Copyright: Chloé Sharrocks

For a full report, see my blog here on nature network, otherwise here are a selection of images I took of the exhibition:

ECO2HOUSE, Copyright: Chloé Sharrocks

Wind Turbine, Copyright: Chloé Sharrocks

Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP, Copyright: Chloé Sharrocks

City Grass Roofs, Copyright: Chloé Sharrocks

Image by Ernesto Azuar Valenzuela (Wikipedia)

…sadly not any time soon, but scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology have managed to create a power-generating jacket which when worn by a hamster can produce very small amounts of renewable (and relatively waste free!) electricity.

Professor Zhong Lin Wang a researcher in the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering confirmed that:

“We believe this is the first demonstration of using a live animal to produce current with nanogenerators….This study shows that we really can harness human or animal motion to generate current.”

Their work also involved using the same nanotechnology to harness energy from finger tapping (such as users of hand-held mobile devices like phones and Blackberry) and convert it into electrical currents.  It is hoped that in the future the users’ own typing might be able to power some of the device using the conversion of human biomechanical energy into electrical.

Image courtesy of Science Daily and Zhong Lin Wang

Their work, published online in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, involved a nanogenerator powered by the piezoelectric effect.  This effect is the ability of some chemicals to generate electrical charges (and thus a current) when they experience a mechanical stress, for example when they are bent or flexed.  Wang and his colleagues made the nanogenerators using zinc oxide wires coated in the a flexible polymer and these single-wired generators could then be attached to the joint of an index finger, or in the hamster’s case, 4 could be combined into a jacket which could be worn by the hamster.

Although their research is certainly interesting, it is worth nothing that to power a Bluetooth headset thousands of these single-wire generators would be required.  So the future of biomechanically produced electricity and a world where we can power our lives through our own movement is still a long way away.

Researchers from China and Japan have discovered that butterflies have small solar ‘cells’ on their wings.

Their work published in the issue of ACS’ Chemistry of Materials journal discusses their discovery that butterfly wings have tiny scales which are capable of collecting solar energy.  They hope their findings might provide new ways to design more efficient solar cells for use on homes and businesses.

Currently the most efficient solar cells are known as Grätzel cells (after their inventor Michael Grätzel) which are a type of dye-sensitized solar cell.  These work using semiconductor technology and are thin-film solar cells, which are cheap to produce and can be made to be flexible.  These engineered cells are the most efficient at converting light into electrical energy of those currently used – they have an efficiency as high as 10%.

Copyright of Michael Apel

However, the scientists work has discovered that  particular scales on the wings of butterflies  are ‘nanobiologically-tuned’ such that they can absorb sunlight and allow the butterfly to survive in colder conditions or regions of higher-altitude.  The efficiency of these cells is even higher than the Grätzel cells.

Researcher Di Zhang and his colleagues used the butterfly wings as moulds (having to soak them in chemicals and bake them in an oven at 500 degrees Celsius) to produce a suitable photoanode which electricity generated from light could pass.  They were then able to study the structure of these photoanodes using scanning and transmission microscopes.  The hope is that the scientists will be able to use the structure of the butterfly wings to help develop commercially viable solar cells based on similar principles.

In the meantime, environmentalists and green activists will have to bite their tongues and refrain from outcries of butterfly cruelty if they wish for renewable energy research to continue!