From Inhabitat:

Just yesterday San Francisco saw the unveiling of the world’s first algae fuel-powered vehicle, dubbed the Algaeus. The plug-in hybrid car, which is a Prius tricked out with a nickel metal hydride battery and a plug, runs on green crude from Sapphire Energy — no modifications to the gasoline engine necessary. The set-up is so effective, according to FUEL producer Rebecca Harrell, that the Algaeus can run on approximately 25 gallonsfrom coast to coast!

Of course, if you read the fine print you find that it’s only running on a 5% algae mixture so I’m not sure if this is much more than a PR stunt for Sapphire Energy, but it’s interesting anyway.  It’s also a little disingenuous to claim the car will be run coast-to-coast on 25 gallons; I’m fairly certain that’s assuming it will be plugged into the electrical grid every day.

If you’ve seen the holodeck on episodes of Star Trek here’s the real-life application. Essentially, Intel is working to create physical, three-dimensional replicas of people or objects, so lifelike that human senses accept them as real. This is interesting stuff for the field of medicine but it’s applications to architectural representation and built form merit discussion as well.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080108083214/http://www.intel.com/research/dpr.htm

Check out the section: ‘Potential applications of Dynamic Physical Rendering’

Here‘s some long-term thinking:

The Ficus elastica produces a series of secondary roots from higher up its trunk and can comfortably perch atop huge boulders along the riverbanks, or even in the middle of the rivers themselves.

The War-Khasis, a tribe in Meghalaya, long ago noticed this tree and saw in its powerful roots an opportunity to easily cross the area’s many rivers. Now, whenever and wherever the need arises, they simply grow their bridges. In order to make a rubber tree’s roots grow in the right direction – say, over a river – the Khasis use betel nut trunks, sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root-guidance systems

…

The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but they’re extraordinarily strong – strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time. In fact, because they are alive and still growing, the bridges actually gain strength over time – and some of the ancient root bridges used daily by the people of the villages around Cherrapunjee may be well over five hundred years old.

Worldchanging reports that a chinese company has been developing an algae farming system similar to what we’ve been discussing in the office; clear tubes filled with algae and salt water.  Brad’s idea about bubbling CO2 through the mixture seems to be the impetus for the project; they’re using the algea to create biofuel from CO2 produced by underground coal gassification:

At ENN’s research campus in Langfang, an hour’s drive from Beijing, scientists are testing microalgae to clean up the back-end of a uniquely integrated process to extract and use coal more efficiently and cleanly than is possible today.

Coal is first gasified in a simulated underground environment. The carbon dioxide is extracted with the help of solar and wind power, then “fed” to algae, which can be then used to make biofuel, fertiliser or animal feed.

…

“Algae’s promise is that its population can double every few hours. It makes far more efficient use of sunlight than plants,” said Zhu Zhenqi, a senior advisor on the project. “The biology has been proven in the lab. The challenge now is an engineering one: We need to increase production and reduce cost. If we can solve this challenge, we can deal with carbon.”

The algae must be harvested every day. Extracting the oily components and removing the water is expensive and energy intensive.

I saw this project on BLDGBLOG the other day and was a little suspicious of the claims being made:

Larsson has proposed using bacillus pasteurii, a “microorganism, readily available in marshes and wetlands, [that] solidifies loose sand into sandstone,” he explains.

I suspected some undergraduate had misunderstood or over-generalized from a research paper, but after reading the links, this looks like a real possibility.  Here are some images of the project based on the science:

And here are some images from the researchers doing the work on microbes:

I love that project – terraforming on a small scale.

OK, so this sounds like something out of bizarro-world, but as far as I can tell it’s not a late April Fools joke:

Microscopic algae called diatoms could help triple the electrical output of experimental, dye-sensitized solar cells, according to researchers at Oregon State University and Portland State University.

Dye-sensitized solar cells are favored as a thin-film material because they work in low-light conditions and are fabricated with environmentally benign materials compared to silicon solar cells. However, silicon cells have more than twice the efficiency, as much as 20 percent compared to less than 10 percent for dye-sensitized solar cells.

The Oregon engineers fed titanium dioxide to living diatoms so they would build shells from the photovoltaic material instead of silicon dioxide, from which they usually build their shells.

“We have found that diatoms will readily accept titanium dioxide in place of silicon dioxide if that’s all we make available to them,” said Rorrer.

The engineers have grown diatoms on a substrate. They have also bred them in bulk, then coated a glass surface with the material. In either case, the pattern of intricate nanoscale features both boosted the photovoltaic surface area available and trapped incident light inside the pores.

After removing the organic material from the shells, leaving behind the diatom’s nanoscale skeletons composed of titanium dioxide, the researchers mixed the material in a dye. The resulting thin-film solar cells had three times the efficiency, according to Rorrer, than the same thin films without diatom nanoscale patterning.

I want a set of titanium-algae-skeleton solar arrays!

So this seems more like an idea than a product, but it’s still cool looking.