Engineered Bacterium Turns Carbon Dioxide into Methane Fuel

Scientists have engineered a bacterium that can take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into fuel in a single enzymatic step.

The process draws on sunlight to produce methane and hydrogen inside the bacterium Rhodopseudomonas palustris, in essence reversing combustion. These engineered bacteria could guide scientists toward better carbon-neutral biofuels.

Researchers published their results yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Co-author Caroline Harwood, a professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, said the report blossomed from her work studying an enzyme called nitrogenase.

“We’re really interested in the enzyme nitrogenase because it does a phenomenally difficult reaction,” she said.

In nature, the enzyme serves as a catalyst to help certain bacteria turn inert atmospheric nitrogen gas into reactive ammonia in a process called nitrogen reduction, or nitrogen fixation. The enzyme uses adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a compound that serves as an energy currency in cells.

Without the enzyme, the nitrogen reduction reaction has a huge energy barrier and rarely occurs on its own.

Researchers wondered if they could tweak nitrogenase to work with other stable and inert molecules. “It’s been sort of recently appreciated that this enzyme is kind of promiscuous and can do other reactions, as well, only not as efficiently,” Harwood said.

Some of her collaborators managed to isolate and alter nitrogenase to use the most oxidized form of carbon, carbon dioxide, as its starting material and produce the most reduced form of carbon — methane. But this modified enzyme was tediously produced in test tubes at small scales, which isn’t good enough for a process that might one day produce industrial quantities of biofuels.

“We wanted to see if we could get an actual living organism to do this conversion,” Harwood said.

The team prepared a version of the R. palustris bacterium that was modified to crank out the engineered nitrogenase at full blast. In its natural state, the bacterium absorbs sunlight to produce ATP, so light helped generate the energy to power the enzyme in the modified cells.

The researchers found that the modified nitrogenase could no longer fix nitrogen, but it could produce methane and hydrogen when the bacteria were illuminated.

However, the new nitrogenase isn’t anywhere near as efficient at producing methane from carbon dioxide as it is at making ammonia from nitrogen gas. “The normal enzyme makes about two hydrogens for every [molecule of] ammonia,” Harwood said. “The altered enzyme makes a thousand hydrogens for every molecule of methane.”

Daniel Lessner, an associate professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, who was not involved in the study, said the findings chalk out a clearer pathway to produce methane, the major component of natural gas, from living organisms.

“It’s exciting,” he said of the new report.

Lessner studies a class of bacteria called methanogens that naturally produce methane. However, they use different starting materials, like acetate.

“The methanogens require other microbes to provide them with other electron donors,” he said. “What you need then is not just one microorganism but multiple microorganisms.”

On the other hand, the new engineered nitrogenase in R. palustris converts carbon dioxide into methane on its own in a single step, simplifying the process. And since it occurs in a living organism, the reaction takes place at ambient temperatures, reducing the energy required to produce a biofuel.

“The process that’s naturally occurring is still more efficient, but because of the simplicity of this engineered organism, it would make it easier to manipulate the process,” Lessner said.

Harwood said her team is now investigating whether they can tweak the enzyme to improve its efficiency in reducing carbon dioxide, as well as looking for other useful chemicals they could make.

Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net. Click here for the original story.

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Comcast’s $70 gigabit deal is shockingly difficult to sign up for

When Comcast brought its gigabit download cable service to Chicago last week, there was plenty of confusion about the price. Comcast initially said it would cost $140 a month, even though a $70 monthly price is available in other cities where Comcast has to compete against Google Fiber.

But after we published a story Friday, a Comcast spokesperson said the $70 offer was available in Chicago after all, contrary to what the company had said earlier that day. But there’s a difference between Comcast telling the media that a great deal is available and customers actually being able to sign up for it.

Comcast told us that customers interested in the offer should sign up at xfinity.com/gig. But when you follow the links, the only pricing listed is $300 a month for 2Gbps fiber Internet and $140 a month for 1Gbps download speeds (with 35Mbps uploads).

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Prisma’s arty photo filters now work offline

There’s a lot going on behind the curtain with Prisma, the app that turns your banal photos into Lichtenstein- or Van Gogh-esque artworks. The app actually sends your cat photo to its servers where a neural network does the complex transformation. Starting soon, that will no longer be necessary, though. "We have managed to implement neural networks to smartphones, which means users will no longer need an internet connection to turn their photos into art pieces," the company says. Only half of Prisma’s styles will be available offline at first (16 total), but others will be added in the "near future."

Running the algorithms locally will speed things up (depending on your smartphone), help folks with poor internet service and free up valuable CPU cycles on its servers. The latter benefit will allow its tech to work with video, in a later release, Prisma adds. "Now that we’ve implemented neural networks right to the smartphones, we have enough servers capacity to run full videos on them in the near future."

Now that we’ve implemented neural networks right to the smartphones, we have enough servers capacity to run full videos on them in the near future.

Prisma claims it’s the first to implement neural network tech on a smartphone, and that "no team or company has ever done anything close." That, it says, opens up AI to developers without access to server farms, meaning "we will see [a lot more] new products based on neural networks." Companies like Google and Apple may beg to differ, as they have already implemented smartphone AI for translation, voice recognition and more.

52 million folks have installed Prisma and 4 million use it daily, according to the company. Much as Snapchat has done, it plans to monetize the app via brand filters, while keeping it free for users. The offline processing speed depends on which smartphone you have — Prisma says it takes six seconds for the iPhone 6s to repaint a photo and a bit more for the iPhone 6s. The new features will arrive to iOS shortly and hit Android after that.

Update: Prisma originally said that it takes 2.5 seconds for an iPhone 6s to process a photo and three seconds for an iPhone 6. However, it now says the transformation takes six seconds on the iPhone 6s and a bit longer with the iPhone 6. The post has been updated with this information.

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PlayStation Now will soon let you play anywhere you have a PC

Analysts have been predicted the death of game consoles for years — and while they’re usually wrong, PlayStation Now is the strongest living argument for a gaming industry without iterative hardware. Sony’s internet-streaming games service puts PlayStation games on micro-consoles, full-sized PlayStation 4 machines and even standalone televisions. Today, Sony announced that the service is coming to an even wider platform: Windows.

Sony says PlayStation Now for Windows will launch in Europe soon, and will be followed by a timely North American rollout — but the exact details are still in the air. Sony has announced that it will sell a $25 DualShock 4 controller adapter for use with the service, for instance, but neglected to say if PlayStation Now for Windows will play nice with other PC gamepads. It might not: PS4 Remote Play on PC and Mac requires Sony’s own controller. It wouldn’t be too shocking if PlayStation Now kept tradition.

Even so, controller compatibility isn’t the only barrier to entry. PlayStation Now is pretty neat, but it requires a hearty internet connection to function properly — at least 5Mbps and a reasonable proximity to PlayStation Now server. The service also requires a PC running Windows 7 or higher, a 3.5Ghz Intel Core i3 or better CPU and 2GB of RAM. If you meet all those requirements, though, you can do something mildly historic: Play PlayStation 3 games on your PC for the first time ever. Neat.

Source: PlayStation

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How to make your WiFi 10x faster

Getting good WiFi at a sporting event isn’t easy.

But researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory think they’ve solved this problem. In crowded areas — be it a concert, airport, conference hall or sports stadium — a bunch of wireless routers need to be installed to deliver Internet access to everyone. Having so many routers can create interference, leaving a frustrated crowd with painfully slow Internet access.

In a new paper published online, the MIT team described a method for managing networks that causes the routers to collaborate better. The researchers developed algorithms that process a router’s signal so that multiple routers can send information on the same wireless spectrum without causing interference. In their tests, the MIT researchers found data transfer speeds that were 3.3 times as fast as usual.

Related: Huge breakthrough in blazing fast Internet speeds

Ezzeldin Hussein Hamed, one of the MIT researchers, said that the data could be transferred 10 times as fast if his team had tested with additional routers.

“This can enable some things that never could’ve been done before,” Hamed said.

The system hasn’t been tested yet in a stadium or other large venue. Hamed’s team demonstrated their advances in a lab, using laptops that roamed on Roomba robots. (The laptops were on Roombas in order to move around like people do in large gatherings.)

So sports fans and concertgoers will have to be patient. Hamed said it was too early to estimate when the average American would experience these gains. The MIT team has created a startup, MegaMIMO, and is talking with companies about how to commercialize their technology.

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Legroom on Most Major Airlines, Compared in One GIF

Most of us don’t choose the airline we fly so much as we choose the most convenient and affordable flight, but if you’ve ever wondered what your odds are of flying comfortably on JetBlue, United, Southwest, or heaven forbid, Spirit, are, this legroom GIF shows you at a glance.

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