Number 1: Energy of the Future
Imagine a world where oil is a material as rare as gold is now, the coal seams are exhausted, and nuclear power is still politically unacceptable. What then will the World do to quench it's unquenchable thirst for energy? Will we have to rely on expensive and unreliable solar power plants, ecologically intrusive wind farms or technically difficult wave power? Or will we just lapse back into a technological dark ages, all our modern equipment unusable and redundant? These are the questions which press scientists and thinkers throughout the modern world. Just how will we cope with the coming energy crisis? One group of scientists, from the University of Northfield in Birmingham UK, think they may have found the answer. Magnus Pyke's brain investigates further...
1988: It was a late night for Professor Paolo Martino and his team, as they awaited the news that their latest experiment into cold fusion was unsuccessful. What had started promisingly had yet again failed to deliver, and the small crew of highly trained physicists were sat in their lab, having a coffee before going home for the night. As they sat there, pondering where the experiment went wrong, they became aware of a noise from the laboratory next door. Professor Martino takes up the story:
"I became aware of a strange rhythmic squeaking noise from the lab next to ours. It didn't sound like a person was in there, but we felt we should investigate just to be sure. As soon as I walked into the room, I saw something that shocked me to the core. What I saw was the answer to our question - how to generate cheap, renewal, clean, almost limitless energy."
At first, Martino's suggestion was condemned as impractical by his peers. Fellow academics shunned him, and started a whispering campaign suggesting that a man who previously held in high regard was nothing more than a charlatan. His position no longer tenable, he left the UK and headed east - taking a position at the Ulan Bator Institute of Energy in Mongolia. For the moment at least, his reputation in tatters, he kept quiet about his idea, concentrating instead on the day to day mundanities of nuclear research. But he had not forgotten what he had seen, and in his spare time he continued to work on his theory.
1997: An American researcher, Bill Biggles, discovers a paper by Martino. Biggles had been searching for information on the experiments Martino and his team had performed into cold fusion, but the paper he found was instead related to Martino's idea.
"The idea was mind blowing!" Says Biggles; "I was blinded by the idea. It was simple but at the same time seemed impractical. But I began to think about it myself. I say think about it - obsess about it might be more the truth - and I began to see a way that it could work."
1999: It was following a chance meeting between Biggles and Martino at a conference that things really started to move. The two were both on their way to a seminar on a particular type of nuclear reactor, when quite literally they ran into each other. Biggles spotted Martino's name badge and grabbed his chance. The seminar was forgotten. What Biggles suggested was dynamite. It was what could make Martino's idea work. There was and is just one missing part. Hamsters.
Hamster: power source of the future?
2002: What Martino had found in the next door laboratory all those years before was a hamster. The rodent was busy running around and around in a wheel, and what Martino realised was that this generated a significant amount of energy. Clean, renewable energy. But what Martino couldn't work out was how to scale up the energy generation onto a commercial scale. For their weight, hamsters do produce a great deal of power, but the challenge of harnessing enough hamsters in efficient treadmills to produce a commercially significant amount of power seemed impossible. Step forward Bill Biggles. Biggles had the answer, but it was not until 2002 that the answer became remotely practical.
The answer is of course genetic engineering. Using the latest techniques, Martino and Biggles are hoping to produce a hamster large enough to make the idea work. Their calculations suggest that a bank of 5 hamsters each 10 metres long and running in a wheel of 20 metres diameter mounted on high efficiency bearings and connected to a high efficiency generator should produce 1 Kilowatt of electricity.
And the system can be scaled up. Martino and Biggles' plans are for a huge hamster power farm generating enough electricity to power a large city. What is more, they envisage a situation where the creatures are engineered to be able to eat household refuse rather than standard hamster food, in one fell swoop solving two of the major problems facing humanity.
Unconvincing architects drawing of hamster generator plant
But there is more work to be done yet. As yet, nobody has managed genetic engineering on this level. Biggles says that they are in discussions with an unanmed institute in South East Asia with a mind to attempting to insert elephant DNA into a hamsters. This, he says, may be the key to developing a large enough, strong enough, hamster to run the generators. Although they have a prototype of the wheel built, it seems that they will have nothing to power it for several years yet. And detractors point to the vast amount of waste material that the hamsters will themselves produce, although as Martino and Biggles point out, this is far easier to dispose of than nuclear waste.
So perhaps finally there is an answer to the World's energy problems, and in years to come we will see vast hamster generator farms providing our power needs. I'm Magnus Pyke's brain - thank you for reading this edition of... The World Tomorrow.