Spore

Leaf (12)
Plant organ (4)
Plant part (4)
Plant tissue (8)
Reproductive structure (57)
Root (35)
Spore (18)
Stalk (77)

Synopsis: Plants: Plant parts: Spore:

and pressure created by the steam were sufficient to kill not just living microbes but also spores and viruses.

#Electrical generator uses bacterial spores to harness power of evaporating watera new type of electrical generator uses bacterial spores to harness the untapped power of evaporating water according to research conducted at the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired

The prototype generators work by harnessing the movement of a sheet of rubber coated on one side with spores.

Such bending back and forth means that spore-coated sheets or tiny planks can act as actuators that drive movement

A soil bacterium called Bacillus subtilis wrinkles as it dries out like a grape becoming a raisin forming a tough dormant spore.

Unlike raisins which cannot reform into grapes spores can take on water and almost immediately restore themselves to their original shape.

In fact spores would be particularly good at storing energy because they are rigid yet still expand

Since changing moisture levels deform these spores it followed that devices containing these materials should be able to move in response to changing humidity levels Mahadevan said.

When Sahin first set out to measure the energy of spores he was taken by surprise. He put a solution thick with spores on a tiny flexible silicon plank expecting to measure the humidity-driven force in a customized atomic force microscope.

But before he could insert the plank he saw it curving and straightening with his naked eye.

and the spores had responded. I realized then that this was extremely powerful Sahin said. In fact simply increasing the humidity from that of a dry sunny day to a humid misty one enabled the flexible spore-coated plank to generate 1000 times as much force as human muscle

and at least 10 times as much as other materials engineers currently use to build actuators Sahin discovered.

In fact moistening a pound of dry spores would generate enough force to lift a car one meter off the ground.

To build such an actuator Sahin tested how well spore-coated materials such as silicon rubber plastic

Then he built a simple humidity-driven generator out of Legosâa miniature fan a magnet and a spore-coated cantilever.

but it could be improved by genetically engineering the spores to be stiffer and more elastic.

Indeed in early experiments spores of a mutant strain provided by Driks stored twice as much energy as normal strains.

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