Scientists have developed a computer that is powered by algae and will never run out of battery. Researchers at the University of Cambridge sealed blue-green algae inside a metal enclosure the size of an AA battery and left it on a windowsill where it photosynthesized, generating a small current.
The project was started in order to create a machine that has less of an environmental impact than traditional computers.
“The growing Internet of Things needs an increasing amount of power, and we think this will have to come from systems that can generate energy, rather than simply store it like batteries,” Professor Christopher Howe, joint senior author of the paper, said in a press statement. “Our photosynthetic device doesn’t run down the way a battery does because it’s continually using light as the energy source.”
The algae-powered ARM chip was used to complete considerably basic calculations and only consumed a tiny 0.3 microwatts an hour, according to New Scientist. This is only a small fraction of what it takes to power a traditional PC. If a normal desktop computer consumes 100 watts of power an hour, you would need roughly 333,000,000 algae “batteries” to run it.
“We were impressed by how consistently the system worked over a long period of time — we thought it might stop after a few weeks, but it just kept going,” Dr. Paolo Bombelli, the first author of the paper, said in a press statement.
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