{"id":28469,"date":"2016-07-29T23:48:41","date_gmt":"2016-07-30T06:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/smart-bricks-would-enable-walls-capable-of-generating-electricity-clean-water-and-oxygen"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:29:13","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:29:13","slug":"smart-bricks-would-enable-walls-capable-of-generating-electricity-clean-water-and-oxygen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/smart-bricks-would-enable-walls-capable-of-generating-electricity-clean-water-and-oxygen","title":{"rendered":"Smart bricks would enable walls capable of generating electricity, clean water and oxygen"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A lot of things are becoming \u201csmart\u201d these days, but bricks might not be something you\u2019d expect to be added to the list. On the way to buildings that act like \u201clarge-scale living organisms,\u201d scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) are developing smart bricks that would make use of microbes to recycle wastewater, generate electricity and produce oxygen.<\/p>\n

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which will be embedded in the bricks to give them their \u201csmart\u201d capabilities, have proven handy in the past, with researchers demonstrating how they can be used to generate electricity from human urine<\/a>, dead flies<\/a> or just plain old mud<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cMicrobial fuel cells are energy transducers that exploit the metabolic activity of the constituent microbes to break down organic waste and generate electricity,\u201d says Ioannis Ieropoulos, professor at UWE Bristol\u2019s Robotics Laboratory. \u201cThis is a novel application for MFC modules to be made into actuating building blocks as part of wall structures. This will allow us to explore the possibility of treating household waste, generating useful levels of electricity, and have \u2018active programmable\u2019 walls within our living environments.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lot of things are becoming \u201csmart\u201d these days, but bricks might not be something you\u2019d expect to be added to the list. On the way to buildings that act like \u201clarge-scale living organisms,\u201d scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) are developing smart bricks that would make use of microbes [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-habitats","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28469"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66732,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28469\/revisions\/66732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}