Virus battery could 'power cars'

[Qutzupalotl]

Interesting line of research...

Viruses have been used to help build batteries that may one day power cars and all types of electronic devices.

The speed and relatively cheap cost of manufacturing virus batteries could prove attractive to industry.

Professor Angela Belcher, who led the research team, said: "Our material is powerful enough to be able to be used in a car battery."

The team from MIT in the US is now working on higher power batteries.

.......

The virus is a so-called common bacteriophage which infects bacteria and is harmless to humans.

more:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7977585.stm

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. They say its harmless to humans, but this shit still scares me.

All nanoscale stuff scares me, because it happens at a realm we know so little about. Like everybody was ranting about how awesome carbon nanotubes were, and they were talking about all the things we could use them for, when some fringe scientist actually had the wild idea of exposing mice to them, and found out they were horrendously carcinegenic, and they binded to DNA in all kinds of weird ways so the mice got cancer. But who listens to that? Just the other day I saw some show on the CIA talking about how they wanted to make dust size nanoscale listening devices and just "scatter them like dust" to gather intelligence, long AFTER the study on mice.

[kristopher]

2. Have you ever heard of "Monster Theory"?

Taming monsters: The cultural domestication of new technology
Smits doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2006.09.008

Abstract

Central to public discomfort about new technologies is the notion that they are unnatural. Experts often suppose that better knowledge of technology and risks would help overcome public aversion. This assumption turns out to be fairly fruitless, often even increasing social polarization. The pattern of diverging risk assessments about technology might be improved by a better understanding of the moral gut feelings at stake. However, current technology ethics does not seem to be equipped for elaborating theories to explain public discomfort. Either public fear is not taken seriously, or ethical–theoretical rationalizations of moral intuitions lead to unsatisfactory, naturalist constructions, such as the intrinsic value of nature.

For a better understanding of current risk controversies, a detour is made to the cultural anthropology of Mary Douglas on pre-modern ideas regarding danger. This offers some clarifying insights into modern perceptions of technological risks. Departing from anthropological observations, a so-called monster theory is sketched, which gives an explanation for the fascination with and aversion towards new technology, leaving aside ‘naturalist’ and ‘nature-skeptic’ explanations of technology ethics. Monster theory offers a point of departure for a new, pragmatic approach to controversies about new technology, the approach being named a pragmatist monster-ethics. It tells us we have to reflect on and shift cultural categories as well as to adapt technologies in order to domesticate our technological ‘monsters’.

<snip>

...monster theory represents an analytical instrument for studying and explaining risk controversies and their moral dilemmas, since it enables us to articulate the accompanying cultural dimension of strong intuitions. This analysis should be directed at making ambiguities explicit at the cultural level. In this way, monster theory offers a contribution to descriptive ethics. Further, explicitation of cultural assumptions might make different risk repertoires of opposed views more accessible to one another.

Monster ethics might even facilitate the anticipation of future monsters. Nowadays, ethicists of technology often start their analyzing and judging activities when moral dilemmas and social deadlocks have already presented themselves <34>. In contrast, a more pragmatist approach enables us to take a more proactive stance towards world-shaping technology. The analysis of and reflection on cultural assumptions will help to anticipate moral controversies and to assimilate future monsters at an earlier stage.

This kind of cultural analysis and anticipation is a necessary step towards a second, more vital opportunity to elaborate technology policy. Analysis of cultural categories will uncover opportunities for enlarging the margins for action. This may encourage activities of pragmatic mediation, aiming at developing interventions in deadlocked debates, so that we prevent the two historical grooves from attaining their full, fruitless depth. Intervention is possible at the level of cultural categories, by way of shifts in those categories, or by way of shaping new concepts for interpreting anew the phenomena experienced as monsters. A pragmatist monster ethics means that we have to develop, renew, and differentiate our cultural categories as well as our technologies, so as to have them fit into a new order.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V80-4MBBYW9-1/2/33a15511c16c1ade209ff3e65353ee5a

[napoleon_in_rags]

4. Looks awesome.

There's a line from a Leonard Cohen song that so often comes to mind when I hear about these technologies:

The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul...
Leonard Cohen, from The Future

I interpret the "order of the soul" as being that sense of right on wrong, that sense of self in the order of things. There is this fear, of the "blizzard of the world", or the emergence of technology separating us completely from that order of the soul. In many ways its already happening, like when economic choices I make can have distant environmental or economic impacts that hurt or kill people, without me having been able to foresee that: Its the fear of being completely separated from control over our own ethics. So its awesome that people are taking on these questions of technology and ethics.

[Javaman]

3. "I can't come to work today, my car is sick". nt