Reasons for Mining Gold, diamonds and ores such as uranium supply national governments with trading goods,

and provide jobs for millions of miners. Mining is essential to modern society. The computer you are using to read this contains about 37 materials that came from mining. The electricity to power it may come from coal, oil, or gas brought from underground.

The advantage to a company and country is that gold is a storehouse of value. Mining and refining it provides a form of hard currency. Gold is industrially useful as a corrosion resistant coating for electronics (there is some in almost every computer). The disadvantages include that mining can damage the environment both on and below the surface. It can imperil water resources by contamination with heavy metals. The miners may be exploited by companies to work in old or dangerous mines, and the temptation to theft can lead to harsh treatment.

Researchers get plastic to act totally metal

Plastics became ubiquitous during the 20th century. They were hot topics of industrial and academic research, and saw innumerable consumer applications. While plastics can have a wide variety of mechanical properties, they are almost universally good insulators, both of heat and electricity. But a paper out of the Pappalardo Micro and Nano Engineering Laboratories reports on a novel processing technique that aligns the polymer chains of polyethylene, which results in a material that has both a high thermal capacitance and a high electrical resistance. The researchers forced the polyethylene to form into this aligned morphology by slowly drawing the fiber out of solution using the tip of an atomic force microscope. The new fibrous form of polyethylene conducts heat well along the direction of the fibersso well, it beats out many pure metals, including iron and

platinum.The resulting fiber was about 300 times more thermally conductive than normal polyethylene. This surprising ability to move heat could find uses in any number of technologies that currently rely on metal as a heat transfer medium. This new method differs from previous attempts at creating a more heat-conductive plastic in that it transforms the morphology of the underlying material instead of using an additive. These prior attempts, while scalable, resulted in only modest gains, since there was high thermal resistance at the interface between the plastic and additive. It's not currently known how well, if at all, the process will be able to scale up to production. So far, the team has only produced single fibers in the laboratory, but they hope to be able to scale up to macro-scale production of entire sheets of this material.

Fresh water + salt water + bacteria = renewable energy

By John Timmer | Published less than a minute ago

Most of the renewable energy sources that are under consideration involve an obvious source of energylight, heat, or motion. But this is the second time this year there has been a paper that has focused on a less obvious source: the potential difference between fresh river water and the salty oceans it flows into. But this paper doesn't simply use the difference to produce some electricity; instead, it adds bacteria to the process and takes out a portable fuel: hydrogen. The process is still fundamentally electrochemical. Sea water and fresh water are placed on opposite sides of a membrane that allows ions through, but prevents the

passage of water molecules. The ions will move to the fresh water to balance osmotic forces, which will create a charge difference that can be harvested for various purposes. The voltage produced in a single one of these cells is small, but the source of the power is essentially unlimited and is available 24 hours a day. The small voltage per cell, however, makes this an impractical method of producing hydrogen by splitting water. It's possible to reach the requisite voltages if enough of these cells are placed in series, but this requires dozens of them, and so many membranes that the cost of this sort of apparatus is prohibitive. That's where the bacteria come in. When given a source of organic material, the bacteria will harvest its electrons by oxidizing the carbon and convert their energy into the cell's main power supply, ATP. But they have to put those electrons somewhere. If they lack a convenient electron acceptor, they'll use an inconvenient one, even if it happens to be outside the cell (this is the principle behind the uraniummunching bacteria we discussed recently). Hook the bacteria up to an electrode, and they'll push their electrons into that. This also provides a relatively low-voltage source of electricity, again too low to power the splitting of water on its own. People have gotten bacteria-powered hydrogen production to work, but only by applying an additional source of voltage. So, the authors went ahead and merged the two. Five fresh/salt water exchange cells were placed in series, with the final anode being used to host bacteria. This small set of cells on its own isn't even sufficient to produce usable current. But when directly linked to the bacterial system, it gave them a sufficient boost to liberate hydrogen, so long as they were supplied with organic matter (in their experiments, the authors used acetate). Increasing the flow of water through the cells boosted the production rate, and hydrogen continued to be released until the acetate was exhausted. The efficiency was rather impressive. At slower flow rates, the total energy content of the hydrogen was 36 percent of the energy input into the system in the form of acetate. At this flow rate, about 85 percent of the energy stored in the hydrogen came from the salt-fresh water difference. The bacteria took the remainder of the energy from the acetate, using it for their continued survival and growth. Pumping water through the system only accounted for about one percent of the energy cost. The bad news is that this highly efficient system requires an expensive, platinumbased cathode. The authors showed that it's possible to use a cheaper, Molybdenumbased cathode, but efficiencies dropped. The authors suggest that it might be possible

to find a cheap material that works well with this system but, as of their publication, they've not identified one. Some of you are probably wondering whether we've got a cheap renewable source of acetate. Fortunately, we don't need one. Acetate provided a convenient way of measuring the amount of energy input into the system, but bacteria can be remarkably unfussy about the source of their organic fuel. As the authors point out, farm waste and human waste could work just as well, given the right bacterial species. In short, we could potentially hook these systems up to a sewer pipe and come out with hydrogen at the other end.