This Valentine’s Day let’s share the love with a little green.

Electric cars seem to have a few issues when it comes to traveling distances. Batteries just take too long to charge, and don’t hold as much juice as we’d like. Not even the great and mighty Tesla (the car company, not Nikola) has managed to solve that problem just yet.

However, chances are, sometime in your life you’ve seen (in real life, or on TV) an electric train, subway, trolley, bus, or other wheeled vehicle of some type that runs on electricity provided by a grid that it’s connected to. You know, that really tall hook thingy that grips those overhead wires? Or the dreaded train/subway rail that you’re not supposed to touch? It’s a common enough concept and makes sense in limited areas. In fact, it’s more energy efficient for a vehicle to grab its power as it travels than it is to lug around a big gas tank.

So why don’t electric cars use the same approach?

Well, all of those wires overhead everywhere could get awfully difficult to maintain for one. And if you used something lower to the ground, chances are some numbskull would electrocute him/her-self crossing a road.

Well, that is, unless you asked Tesla (Nikola, not the car company) to come up with a solution.  (Wardenclyffe Tower anyone?) Sadly, being dead, no one thought to ask Nikola Tesla how to power an electric car without plugging it into the road. So it took us an awfully long time for we mere mortals to think of this: We could always charge an electric car wirelessly as it drives.

Thanks to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science soon two electric busses will be able to travel along the road from Gumi station by recharging their batteries wirelessly from induction loops embedded in the road along the route. No zappy-zappy to humans. It’s effectively the same technology that lets some cellphones and even toothbrushes recharge wirelessly, only applied to moving vehicles.

And if you eat the cost to put this same kind of technology into urban areas, you could easily design a gridwork of roads where electric cars, busses, trolleys, etc. can recharge themselves as they drive. All without wires.

It could become a green-city utopia.

Even major highways, tollways, turnpikes, etc. where longer distance driving is done could be augmented with sections of induction charging to allow electric cars, that drive on the right roads, to eat up the miles indefinitely without ever needing to stop for a charge, which would make electric cars infinitely greener and more convenient than their gas-guzzling compatriots at that point. Imagine driving thousands of miles without ever having to stop for fuel even once.

In theory, it’s possible. And Korea is the one showing us how.

Mother Nature seems to have a few PhDs in quantum physics, researchers at Cambridge University have discovered as they look into the ocean-dwelling Green Sulfur Bacteria. This bacteria manages to thrive at a depth of 2,000 meters below the sea, still using photosynthesis to nab energy from the sun, in spite of sunlight barely making it down that far.

So how does Green Sulfur Bacteria manage to use photosynthesis to thrive in a nearly lightless environment?

It isn’t easy!

Photosynthesis in general works as thus: Chlorophyll, a natural pigment, absorbs energy from photons (AKA sunlight). That absorbed energy from photons is turned into excitons and carried as a quantum wave into the “reaction center” of a pigment protein complex, where electrons necessary for the chemistry of photosynthesis are released. So photosynthesis itself is already something of a quantum physics experiment in plant life all around us. But plants, not really needing great efficiency as sunlight is rather abundant, don’t necessarily do this as well as they theoretically could.

And breathe. Sciencey stuff is halfway through now.

Where the Green Sulfur Bacteria has astonished researchers and may pave ways for all sorts of future improvements is that it has a highly specialized approach to ensuring that as little of that energy gets wasted as possible. What has excited researchers is that the Green Sulfur Bacteria takes the energy that would have been lost due to inefficiency and actually re-energizes it back to exciton level through molecular vibrations, ensuring that every possible photon absorbed results in a chemical reaction.

Preserving the quantum coherence with much more efficiency has important implications in efficiency for a number of applications, from solar cells (obviously) to things like room-temperature quantum computing.

It’s just another example of nature showing us extreme elegance of design in a supposedly random universe.

And one step closer to quantum CPUs powering our home computers.

Since before 1500BC people of Egypt and Asia have been turning the roots of madder plants into dye for cloth and paint. We still use it today, in fact. One such extract, purpurin (scientifically known as 1,2,4-Trihydroxyanthraquinone), used for making red and yellow dyes, was scientifically isolated from the madder root as far back as 1826 by Pierre Jean Robiquet and Jean Jacques Colin, obviously both French chemists. But only recently have researchers of The City College of New York (in combination with Rice University and the US Army Research Laboratory) found a novel new use for the madder plant’s famous extracts.

That novel new use? Why replacing cobalt in lithium-ion batteries, of course!

They found that purpurin’s molecular structure has aromatic rings with carbonyl and hydroxyl groups that make it an excellent replacement for cobalt in moving electrons in batteries.

Why is this so important? Well, for several reasons. First is that purpurin is obviously cheaper. It occurs naturally, but can also be synthesized. It’s readily available. Whereas cobalt is a metal that requires high temperatures to smelting and refining and releases toxins into the air in the process thereof.

Second is that purpurin is easier to process. Cobalt also requires high temperatures to combine with lithium to make the lithium cobalt oxide (LCO) used in lithium-ion batteries. But purpurin can be combined with lithium at much lower temperatures, making production of the batteries more efficient.

Third is toxicity. LCO is toxic, capable of causing heart conditions in long-term exposure as well as being regarded as potentially carcinogenic. Obviously purpurin isn’t. (Though honestly I’m not sure what happens once it’s mixed with lithium.)

So basically it’s cheaper, it’s safer, and it’s easier. So who wouldn’t want to make our lithium-ion batters that much greener by using purpurin instead of cobalt?

I also wonder how long it’ll be before someone also checks for its use in nickel-based batteries (such as Ni-Cad) where cobalt is also used.

So when is a chicken not a chicken? When it ducks!

You might be wondering how in the world that pathetic old joke is relevant to those spinning little (or big) fans in your computer case. If you’re a custom PC builder, be it for the sweet sound of silence, or for some rage against the machine overclocking, if there’s one thing that you know, it’s fans. Electronics don’t like to be hot, and whether it’s moving air over a heatsink or moving air over a liquid cooling radiator, at some point you just have to transfer the heat that computer parts generate into the air. That means you need Ye Olde Whirling Dervish, AKA a fan.

But fans are tricky. You’re often limited to the size of the fan that you can use, which reduces their efficiency. The speed that they run at and the design of the fan blades determine all sorts of factors from the amount of air moved, to the pressure of the air, to the focus cone of how the air moves, to the amount of power the fans consume, to the noise that they make as the blades spin around going whir whir whir. And then there’s the bearing design. How long will the fan really last? When it comes to PCs, fans are a tricky business!

But what if your fan … wasn’t a fan?

General Electric has developed an interesting novel approach to moving air in consumer electronics, which they based not on Ye Olde Whirling Dervish, but on a bellows. Taking a concept from their commercial jet engines, GE used tiny ceramic piezoelectronics and two 40mm x 40mm metal plates to make what they call a Dual Piezo Cooling Jet (DCJ).

The little buggers are smaller than fans, move more air, use less electricity, and make so little noise as to be virtually inaudible. And with no bearings to grind, in theory they’ll last longer too! Allegedly they don’t even gather dust. In theory they’re better all-around than any fan.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Sounds great! Where can I get a DCJ?” that’s where problems start to come in. Because GE isn’t really interested in manufacturing and selling the DCJs themselves. They’re only promoting the intellectual property. GE is presently demonstrating DCJs to manufacturers and so far have licensed the design to only one company: Fujikura LTD of Japan. So it may be some time yet before you can buy one.

There’s also another problem: the way that they work. As you watch their video, you realize one really important thing, DCJs are thin. Like really really thin. Sure, they create a jet of air, but how often in a big PC case do you need a really tiny Jetstream? If you want a big fan, or need to cover a lot of area, the DCJ may not be for you. They look to create a very concentrated little jetstream. Sure, it moves air, but how many of the little buggers do you need to cover as much area as you want? And in the case of an exhaust fan, what’ll it feel like to be the person who dares to walk behind the computer? So there may be a few features that need tweaking for PC use. It’s a design that’ll work great in super-thin devices, like smartphones, tablets, and ultrabooks. I’m not so convinced about larger consumer electronics though. Not without a serious rethink of how air moves in the device. I don’t see someone fitting a DCJ into any traditional fan slot. They just work too differently, moving air along a completely different axis.

I’m also not sure that I like the idea of my cellphone having a fan.

Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? We could find that five years from now the Dual Piezo Cooling Jet may just have completely revolutionized consumer electronics airflow designs. I can already see a few of my old theoretical computer case designs that I’d been thinking about for silence that didn’t work well with traditional spinning fans would work quite the treat with DCJs. They’d finally become reasonable designs. Makes me wish I had the money to patent a few case designs and manufacture them.

It also makes me wonder, if they can move air so much more efficiently, and air is just a fluid (as far as the physics of fluid dynamics are concerned) how about an adaptation to water? And if that works, what about other liquids? From better water cooling rigs in PCs to fuel injection in cars, just how many things could DCJs actually revolutionize? Has anyone at GE even thought through all of the potential implications and applications?

And just how big can these be made and still work right?

Beats me! But I can’t wait to find out.

Sometimes an idea is so brilliantly simple that you wonder why it took so long to come up with it. Why didn’t we think of it sooner? For years I’ve been pondering ways to use potential energy as a storage medium for solar and wind power as a means to provide energy during peak-need instead of during peak-production, because one of the big problems with solar and wind energy is that it often produces the most energy exactly when the grid doesn’t need it. The disparity can actually cause problems.

Batteries seem like a logical solution because we know them so well when it comes to storing electricity. Charge a battery and take your power from it when you need it. It works fine in small scale, say in your own home. But in large scale, like solar or wind farm size, there just aren’t enough batteries in the world and it’d cost a ridiculous amount to try.

Which brought me to the next logical step. If you had a water source, sure, you could have big hydrogen tanks fueled by electrolysis that power fuel cells when the grid needs it. Should be simple enough, if technical. But still expensive. And potentially explosive. Besides, no hydrogen tank can really trap hydrogen well, so you’re going to lose what you store if you don’t use it quickly. Downtime could be disastrous. Not to mention what is the efficiency in general?

In theory though any time-shifting of the power produced would be more beneficial than trying to produce power when no one needs it and producing nothing when everyone turns on their lights.

But is there a better way yet? That brought me to the next obvious idea, hydro-electric dams. If you have a water source (lake, ocean, river, whatever) and you have the space for it, then you could theoretically design a hybrid pump/generator that stores energy in the form of gravity, by moving water uphill during peak production time, and letting those same water pumps in turn produce electricity from the stored water during peak demand time. Maybe the next windmill is also a water tower so that it can store its own energy in the form of potential energy/gravity for use during a better time? Still not likely to be the most efficient design in the world, but gravity as a battery is something we’ve been doing for a long time in other forms. We just didn’t really think about it.

Then I had to wonder, what about water-starved locations? Not many deserts can afford to waste that much water, but that’s where so much sun and space are. Well, then what about sand? Or other forms of earth? Once more, in theory, would it really be all that difficult to build sand/dirt towers instead of water towers?

But strangely, in all of this pondering, I missed the obvious. As have a great many people. I missed the usefulness of applying the same concept to a different scale.

Funny enough, some Brits found their own way to this very solution when approaching a completely different problem.

Enter Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves, co-inventors of the GravityLight. Their goal was to invent a lamp for developing countries where power grids are unreliable or non-existent. Many people in these places commonly use kerosene lamps and such, generally requiring a certain cost to fuel, as well as potentially fouling air and impacting health, especially when used in small domiciles. They wanted a “green” and cheap solution. The kind modern society should be able to engineer to help raise the standard of living for everyone. Something I’ll always applaud.

The initial idea for their light was to use solar power and a battery. We’ve got plenty of those lighting up gardens already, really. But the cost and practicality weren’t ideal, especially as batteries wear out and are full of nasty chemicals, costing money to replace a well as creating their own potential health problems if chemicals of batteries discarded hit the water supplies. And that’s when the brilliant notion came to light: Ditch batteries. Use gravity!

So they tossed the solar panels and batteries and instead created a novel concept whereby a sack of dirt or rocks is lifted up to a hanging GravityLight and over the course of a half-hour the generator turned by the descent of mass provides power to the LED in the GravityLight. And when the power runs out, just lift the bag of rocks back up and start the process all over again. It’s brilliant. It’s simple. It works any time.

They’ve even put in a bypass to the LED to allow you to hook up your own wires to run a radio, charge a cellphone, or do whatever else you can think of.

Frankly, their GravityLight is ingenious.

And better, they’re trying hard to get the price down as much as they can. Their target is to be able to mass-produce the GravityLight for less than $5 so that developing nations can afford them, especially as once they can end their reliance upon fuels for lights, the savings really start to add up.

You can help fund their GravityLight project on Indiegogo. They’re trying to fund the project up to producing 1000 units to gift free-of-charge to villagers in Africa and India for their first serious round of user testing. They hope to gain valuable information on usage and further changes to meet other needs from that testing before they get to the full mass-production stage. It’s hard not to applaud that kind of gumption.

But as I watch Doomsday Preppers on TV, I also can’t miss the obvious potential there as well. Not just the fringe group of preppers, but honestly campers in general as well as emergency plans for various businesses. It even makes me wonder if you could replace the gravity bag component with a wound spring turned by a crank. Or even turned by the generator (hybrid motor) for emergency lighting in buildings. I wonder if you could scale it up for a UPS that has a potential energy battery instead of a chemical one. This is one of those shining moments of breakthrough that could affect all sorts of future invention. Gentlemen, I salute you! Who needs nasty chemical batteries when we can store potential energy instead?  Gravity.  It’s not just a wonderful thing, it’s the law.