Researchers Turn Waste Toilet Paper into Electricity Source

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 A team of Dutch scientists is working to address the world’s energy problems from the bottom up, in a manner of speaking.
 

 In fact, it’s a solution that’s been right under our noses all along. Researchers from the University of the Netherlands and the University of Amsterdam are looking into the possibility of using waste toilet paper (WTP) as a source of electricity.
 

 “People usually prefer not to think about it at all,” the researchers said in their study.
 

 But lead researcher Els van der Roest says that the basic technologies are already in place to turn this waste into a valuable resource.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/toilet_paper_orientation_over.width-990_SWmtjYL.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Used toilet paper may just be the fuel of the future, say Dutch researchers.
 
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 “In Scandinavian countries [for example,] waste toilet paper is already sieved out of the sewage system. And the gasification and cleaning equipment is currently being installed in Alkmaar, the Netherlands,” she said.
 

 Her co-researcher, Dr. Gadi Rothenberg, agrees.
 

 “I think [our work] will be relevant to those cities and communities that already pay someone to clean the processed WTP from their sewage installation filters. This happens in most western European countries,” he said in an email interview.
 

 In 2010 alone, some 27,000 trees’ worth of toilet paper was either flushed or dumped into landfills every day,
 <a href="http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/M-J%2010%20Digital.pdf">
 according to World Watch.
 </a>


 And in 2016, over 142 million consumers polled in the US admitted to using as much as an entire roll of tissue every other day,
 <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/275969/us-households-amount-of-toilet-paper-used-within-30-days/">
 according to Experian researchers.
 </a>


 With so much material to work with, the Dutch researchers saw a golden opportunity: up to 80 percent of dry toilet paper is made of combustible cellulose—a prime candidate for fuel, if it can be processed efficiently.
 

 “It is a rich source of carbon [and] is continuously available in the developed world regardless of country and season,” the researchers noted.
 

<a href="https://www.kwrwater.nl/en/experts-expertises/experts/els-van-der-roest/">
 Van der Roest
 </a>
 and her team devised a two-stage process in which waste toilet paper is collected and gasified before being introduced into a fuel cell.
 

 Similar to a battery, a fuel cell relies on chemical reactions to directly produce electricity.
 

 The gases are then introduced into a fuel cell, where chemical reactions convert the gases into electricity.
 

 The system converts up to 57% of waste paper into into energy, according to the researchers, which is comparable to the output of existing natural gas power plants.
 

 The system also has the added benefit of helping minimize the carbon footprint of power generation, since it would be tapping otherwise unutilized biological waste.
 

 “The electricity from WTP could displace electricity from fossil sources such as coal and gas. Upon taking into account that WTP originates from biomass, the CO
 
 2
 
 emissions would be comparable to those of electricity from renewable sources,” the researchers said.
 

 Some things still need to be worked out, though: fuel cell technology is still expensive, making the system economically unfeasible at least for now.
 

 The researchers expressed optimism, however, that the cost will go down as the technology matures.
 

 “Given that the solid-oxide fuel cell market is still developing, strong learning-by-doing and economies-of-scale effects are expected. This could result in a decrease in the levelized cost of electricity on the longer term,” the researchers concluded.
 

 So how soon will it be before we see a toilet paper-powered electric plant? It’s mostly a matter of political will, according to Rothenberg.
 

 “The hurdles are like the ones for any new process: building the first installation is risky and expensive, and municipalities are typically risk-averse,” he explained.
 

 But there’s also one surprising problem that may arise from the widespread use of this system: Should WTP power technology take off, we can likely expect used toilet paper to gain in value.
 

 “Currently, the fuel costs are negative (because we use waste as a raw material), yet this could change if the value of WTP would increase as a result of this process,” the researchers said.
 

 Which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “flushing money down the toilet.”
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toilet_paper_orientation_over.jpg">
 Elya / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
 </a>

Bee-Brained Robot Reveals Nature's Navigation Secrets

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 How do bees make a beeline for home? European scientists may have found the answer—paving the way for everything from better bee conservation to building smarter robots.
 

 Despite wandering far in search of food, bees head straight for their hive using a process called “path integration”: they remember each time they take a new path and put these memories together to plot a course home.
 

 Researchers from Lund University in Sweden, along with colleagues in the United Kingdom and Australia, discovered exactly how this is done by
 <a href="http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31090-4">
 studying
 </a>
 the brains of nocturnal
 
 Megalopta genalis
 
 bees.
 
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 “[This study] has practical importance in understanding the challenges bees may face in navigating an anthropogenic landscape.” said John Stotskopf Ascher, a melittologist (or bee researcher) at the National University of Singapore who was not involved with the study. “It shows how bees, like many insects, have great potential as a model for biomimetics.”
 

 By hooking the bees up to a flight simulator and looking at their brains under a microscope, the researchers were able to identify neurons that keep track of speed and direction using information from the insects’ eyes.
 

 “Direction neurons” act like compasses, keeping track of sources of polarized light in the environment—such as from the moon and stars—to remember where the bee is in relation to the light source. Meanwhile, “speed neurons” track movement and serve as a kind of odometer to let the bee know how fast it’s moving.
 

 The researchers devised a computational model of how these neurons interact, which they then plugged into a smartphone-powered robot equipped with a 360-degree camera, which mimicks how bees see.
 

 “We sent [the robot] out on a random route and the model of the bee’s navigation system that we implemented allowed it to find the direct path back to its starting point,” said Lund University biologist Stanley Heinze, one of the researchers.
 

 It was no easy feat to find and identify the neurons responsible for this behavior.
 

 “There are about one million cells in the bee brain, out of which there are exactly four speed neurons. Finding these cells repeatedly in many individuals while blindly probing the brain with an electrode was a huge challenge,” Heinze said.
 

 As for compass neurons, “we recorded from over 160 bees and found [only] ten compass neurons,” he said.
 

 It took several years to accumulate enough raw data for the study, and the translation into a working robot required extensive cooperation between the biologists and roboticists.
 

 The effort, though, could pay dividends in bee conservation and robotics.
 

 Vicki Wojcik, the research director of
 <a href="http://pollinator.org/">
 Pollinator Partnership
 </a>
 , said that the study may help scientists understand the subtle effects of pesticide on bees.
 

 Bees, she says, are not necessarily dying from exposure to pesticides. “It’s that they’re encountering pesticides and being subjected to these chronic sub-lethal effects that can impact either their ability to grow and reproduce…or their cognitive ability to forage and find home.”
 

 Heinze is hopeful that his team’s work might lead to more efficient robots in the not-too-distant future.
 

 As it stands, not even the latest state-of-the-art drone technology can hold a candle to the elegant simplicity of bee brains.
 

 “The brain of a bee is way smaller and less complex than ours but still a factor more powerful than drone brains,” said Matthew Cua, the founder and CEO of private drone operator Skyeye Analytics, Inc.
 

 But Heinze’s team is showing just how bees are able to do more with less, and how this makes for hardier robots.
 

 “The advantage of our circuit would be that it only consists of very few neurons that perform a robust computation—it’s very resilient to disturbance—and that it only requires visual input,” Heinze said.
 

 Cua said that nature still has much to teach us about efficient engineering. “We may have the most powerful hardware, but our software can’t maximize it,” he said.
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Megalopta_genalis_side_view.jpg">
 USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
 </a>

Bilingual people rely on visuo-spatial pathways when solving math problems—something not seen in monolingual people.

Brains of Bilingual People Solve Math Problems Differently

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 For anyone who’s breezed through literature class yet struggled with algebra, it may surprise you that language and math skills are more closely intertwined than you might think.


 Scientists from the University of Luxembourg have found that brain regions associated with visual processing are activated in bilingual people when solving math problems in their second language—something that’s not seen in monolingual people, and which has lifetime implications.


 “The language in which you learn maths will influence your performance even into adulthood and even in well-mastered tasks like addition,” said Dr. Amandine van Rinsveld, one of the lead researchers.


 They focused on adults who were fluent in both German and French, having been taught in these languages in primary and secondary school, respectively.


 Despite their fluency in both languages, the participants answered faster and made fewer mistakes when tasked with math problems in their mother tongue.


 With fMRI imaging, the scientists saw that the participants took longer to solve problems in their second language and were also using brain regions normally associated with spatial and visual thinking.

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 “Highly proficient bilinguals… rely to a greater extent on the visuo-spatial pathways when solving arithmetic problems in the language for which the verbal route might be more difficult to use,” the scientists said
 <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393217301756">
 in their paper
 </a>
 .


<a href="http://www.cogneuro-lab.org/UserFiles/Publication/Effectsoflanguageswitchingonarithmetic_abilingualfmristudy_JOCN06.pdf">
 In an earlier study
 </a>
 , bilingual Chinese students also solved math problems faster when these were spelled out for them in their mother tongue. But it was believed that they took longer to do the same task in their second language because they were translating the problems in their heads.


 It seems to make sense that people would do math in the language that’s most convenient for them.


 “One thing where [language] may come in handy is the units. For example, one hundred is ‘bai’ and ten thousand is ‘wan’ in Mandarin, so one million is just ‘bai wan’,” said Philip Nino Tan-Gatue, a Filipino-Chinese physician who grew up with English as his first language but who admits that he sometimes finds it useful to do math in his second language.


 “That’s one of the big problems with brain scan studies. We don’t know what the activation of regions of the brains correspond to, either behaviorally or visually,” said Dr. Walter Secada, Professor of Teaching and Senior Associate Dean at the University of Miami School of Education and Human Development.


 He said that it’s possible that the subjects were visualizing the problems in the way that they were taught in school.


 “Have you ever seen an adult count on his or her fingers? They do it all the time. So I would say what they’re seeing is the brain analogues of what [the test subjects] were taught to do when they were little kids,” he said.

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 Further research is needed to understand what exactly is going on, van Rinsveld said. “What is certain is that it took them more time to do the additions in French for the complex problems and they solved it differently as the pattern of brain activations looks different than when they did it in German,” she said


 In the meantime, van Rinsveld believes that her team’s study should at least make educators more considerate of language when teaching mathematics.


 “This opens our perspective to the fact that maths are not as ‘language-free’ as is commonly assumed… Math teaching should thus pay attention to the language of instruction and careful for learners who do not master [it] well,” she said.


 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/mathematics-schoolboy-calculation-2640219/">
 jackmac34 / Pixabay (CC0 1.0)
 </a>

Bilingual people rely on visuo-spatial pathways when solving math problems—something not seen in monolingual people.

Timothy James Dimacali

Articles

Researchers Turn Waste Toilet Paper into Electricity Source

Bee-Brained Robot Reveals Nature's Navigation Secrets

Brains of Bilingual People Solve Math Problems Differently

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