From:                              Integrity Research Institute <iri2@comcast.net>

Sent:                               Thursday, July 26, 2012 6:46 PM

To:                                   Valone, Thomas

Subject:                          Future Energy eNews

 

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  FUTURE ENERGY eNEWS

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JULY 2012

  

Dear Subscriber,

  

We are happy to share another vindication of the IRI advocacy program with the lead story #1 on betavoltaic power using a tritium nuclear source. As many may remember, the first COFE in 1999 featured Paul Brown who also was the first recipient of the coveted Integrity in Research Award. Paul, who passed away under mysterious circumstances as he launched Nuclear Solutions, obtained several patents on the tritium "isotopic semiconductor batteries" such as #6,238,812, #6,118,204, and #5,087,533, which resemble smoke detectors in their operation. However, in Paul's absence, the company was never able to bring such a simple and valuable product, lasting over 20 years, to market. Now a startup company City Labs, Inc. has apparently succeeded, with Lockheed approval and funding from the Air Force Research Lab. To see more of the history of this invention, purchase the IRI Nuclear Battery Report, which features much of Paul Brown's work in the field and other support material.

 

What could be cheaper than a "spray-on" solar panel? That's what our story #2 believes with New Energy Technologies invention that promises to ramp up production and bring down cost. The beauty is that the polymer also harvests indoor lighting as well as in other low light conditions. To piggyback with such an innovation, we have added the similar story #3 on "spray-on" power supplies, which can go on any surface to create a lithium-ion battery instantly!

 

Well, putting viruses to work generating electricity at 400 mV and 6 nA is also very impressive, besides being equivalent to the proverbial "free energy". The 20 layer thick battery is piezoelectric so it works with applied pressure, much like the crystal roads story of Innowattech that we ran last month.

 

Lastly, an article that has motivated us greatly from New Scientist is about a cure for cancer. Story #5 spells out the Warburg effect where glycosis predominates with cancer, which is also described in my book, Bioelectromagnetic Healing. The story about cancer cravings being the undoing has the recommendation for a flood of antioxidants in between chemotherapy treatments, rather than with the chemo, so that the free radicals (peroxide mostly) can be neutralized. We immediately applied this protocol (Premier Jr treatment and Ester C three times a day) to a patient with non-Hogkins lymphoma and have measured at least a half inch reduction in size of swollen lymph nodes in less than one week at the time Future Energy eNews went to press. (The Premier Junior by the way, is a concentrated form of electronic antioxidants - the active ingredient in ALL antioxidant free radical quenchers.)

 

Thomas Valone, PhD,PE   

Editor   

www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org   

IN THIS ISSUE

1) BETAVOLTAIC POWER SOURCE FOR 20 YEARS+

2) SPRAY ON PHOTOVOLTAIC WINDOWS

3)SPRAY ON POWER SUPPLY

4) SCIENTISTS GENERATE ELECTRICITY FROM VIRUSES

5) CANCER: ITS ENERGY CRAVINGS COULD BE ITS UNDOING

 

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1)Betavoltaic Power Source Provides source of continuous nanoWatt Power for 20 + Years

ECN Magazine July 2012

 http://www.ecnmag.com/news/2012/06/betavoltaic-power-source-provides-source-continuous-nanowatt-power-20-years

  

Nano Tritium 20+ year batteryCity Labs, Inc. has released its first commercial product, a tritium-based betavoltaic power source that enables low-power microelectronic and sensor applications where battery replacement is difficult, impossible, or life-threatening. The Model P100a betavoltaic power source provides a source of continuous nanoWatt power for 20 years or more in microelectronic platforms. Applications include environmental pressure/temperature sensors, intelligence sensors, medical implants, trickle charging lithium batteries, semi-passive and active RFID tags, silicon clocks, SRAM memory backup, deep-sea oil wellelectronics, lower power processors (e.g. ASICs, FPGAs, microcontroller units, etc.). As tested and confirmed by Lockheed Martin, the City Labs NanoTritium betavoltaic is able to resist broad temperature extremes where traditional lithium batteries are subject to failure. City Labs asserts the first company in the betavoltaic battery industry to be granted a Product Regulatory General License to manufacture, sell, and distribute its NanoTritium betavoltaic power sources. These devices contain small amounts of tritium, a radioisotope commonly found in Exit signs and diver's watches. The General License provides the end-user with a safe, reliable and commercially available betavoltaic power source, and eliminates both the burden of regulatory paperwork and end-user radiological training. The General License also allows for easy purchase of the betavoltaic power source without requiring the customer to have a prior radiation license.

City Labs, Inc.
305-909-7593, www.citylabs.net

 RELATED ARTICLE

  

 

MIT Technology Review Features City Labs' Betavoltaic Batteries

Published In Partnership with Enterprise Florida

  

SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION: The Technology Review Custom Team takes a look at the technologies that are changing the ways in which we do businessin the clean energy, life sciences, infotech and homeland security clusters.

 

BETAVOLTAIC BATTERIES

 

Current chemical batteries have a number of limitations, including their short lifespan and the limited range of temperatures and pressures at which they can function. Peter Cabauy of City Labs Inc. in Homestead, FL, discovered these limitations when he and his cofounders looked into starting a new technology company in south Florida.

 

Founded in 2005 and first housed within Florida International University's technology incubator, City Labsoriginally partnered with Lockheed Martin Florida to develop betavoltaic batteries. Like photovoltaic cells, betavoltaic batteries absorb radiation, but instead of sunlight, the radiation comes from a physical source that emits electrons.

 

City Labs focused on tritium as a radiation source, as tritium-one of the most benign radioisotopes-is already used to power the phosphorescent glow in the watches used by divers and in exit signs (though the signs are not battery powered). In December 2010, the company was awarded a contract worth nearly $1 million from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory for its tritium-based batteries.

  

IRI has carried for 10 years the Nuclear Battery Report  by Paul Brown, (scroll down to bottom of page)  who pioneered betavoltaic batteries 15 years ago.

 

  

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2) Spray-On Photovoltaic Windows

 MIT Magazine, David Zack, June 2012

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428366/spray-on-photovoltaic-windows/?nlid=nlenrg&nld=2012-07-02  

 

sprayable solar windows 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Energy Technologies, a solar energy startup here in the US, has developed a technique to manufacture "spray-on" photovoltaic windows. The technique should ramp up production speed and bring down costs.

First of all, what's meant by a spray-on window? New Energy Technologies gives a good run-downof the product, which they call SolarWindow, on their site. The tech uses an organic solar array made up of extremely small solar cells--they measure about a quarter of the size of a grain of rice.

The Christian Science Monitor, in a story back on Earth Day, futher explains that NET developed plastic polymers that, when sprayed on a window, would produce electricity. The stuff is so effective as to harvest light even from northern exposure, and indeed even from indoor fluorescent lighting. "It will generate electricity even in low light conditions," John Conklin, NET's CEO, told the Monitor. NET teamed up with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Florida to develop the tech.

The Engineer, which reported on the manufacturing breakthrough, says that the film can be sprayed on in an ultra thin, sub-micrometer layer. The breakthrough is important for American industry, because as the Monitor pointed out in April, while American firms experimenting in spray-on solar had the technical edge, Chinese companies were so far able to produce the stuff more cheaply.


And spray-on solar is more than just an eye-catching innovation. It's potentially a revolution in solar power, a move away from the traditional rooftop solar array. "It puts energy harvesting everywhere," said Ken McCauley of Konarka, an NET competitor, to the Monitor.

Everywhere, that is, assuming the cost of production could come down. The traditional method to make spray-on solar panels was something called vacuum deposition, which was time-consuming and expensive. But NET found a way to do what the Engineer calls "high-speed roll-to-roll and sheet-to-sheet manufacturing," and it made the process possible at low temperatures and at ambient pressure.

At the end of the day, a major logjam in the ascent of solar power comes down to finance and cost-cutting. New Energy Technologies' manufacturing innovation is a step in the right direction

 

 

  

 

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3) Graffiti Battery Lets you Spray on Power Supply 

June 28 2012 by Jacob Aron, New Scientist

 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21987-graffiti-battery-lets-you-spray-paint-power-supply.html 

 

 

Five sprayable paints form a lithium-ion battery when layered together, letting you store energy on walls, tiles or even your favourite mug.

 

Run out of batteries? Just spray-paint some new ones. Researchers have created five sprayable paints that form a lithium-ion battery when layered together, letting you store energy on walls, tiles or even your favourite mug.

Regular batteries contain a positive and negative electrode, both paired with a metal current collector, and a polymer separator sandwiched in the middle. These five layers are normally manufactured in sheets and rolled up into a cylinder, making it hard to create extremely thin batteries.

  spray on battery

Now, Neelam Singh and colleagues at Rice University in Houston have used a combination of existing metallic paints and custom materials to create sprayable versions of each layer, allowing them to make batteries just a fraction of a millimetre thick by airbrushing the layers onto a surface, one at a time.

 

The team applied their batteries to a variety of ordinary building materials and even a ceramic drinks mug to test their potential. Nine bathroom tile batteries charged by a solar cell were able to power 40 LEDs arranged to spell out "RICE" for six hours. They don't yet match regular batteries - a paintable battery would have to be about 1.5 square feet to match a standard mobile phone battery - but that is set to improve. "Their capacity, efficiency and performance could be vastly improved if made on an industrial scale," explains Singh.

 

Pairing the batteries with recently developed paintable solar cells could potentially give your walls an electrifying DIY makeover, but Singh says the paints are not quite ready for home use, as paints must be applied in a moisture- and oxygen-free environment onto surfaces heated to 120 °C.

 

"The focus of our ongoing research is to develop new battery materials which would not be degraded by air or moisture, non-toxic and safe to handle and use at home by non-experts, and environmentally friendly during use and disposal," says Singh. Only then will you be able to pick up a few spray cans and build your own batteries.

"I don't think people will be doing this at home, but maybe secondary manufacturers would be painting on batteries," says John Owen, a chemist who researches batteries at the University of Southampton, UK. For example, there are already companies that will gold-plate your iPhone - perhaps they could also add an extra battery coating.

 

Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/srep00481

 

 

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4) Scientists Generate Electricity from Viruses

Electronic Products Magazine. July 2012

 

Device is first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material.


Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working on a device that will let you charge your phone as you walk, using a paper-thin generator embedded in the sole of your shoe. The power is generated using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.

The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. Tapping a finger on a postage-stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.

  

Their generator is the first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material. It points to a simpler way to make microelectronic devices. That's because the viruses arrange themselves into an orderly film that enables the generator to work. Self-assembly is a much sought after goal in nanotechnology.

"More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics," says Seung-Wuk Lee, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division and a UC Berkeley associate professor. He conducted the research with a team that includes Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and a professor at UC Berkeley, and Byung Yang Lee of Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division.

 

They found that the M13 bacteriophage, which only attacks bacteria and is benign to people, had piezoelectric properties. Being a virus, it replicates itself by the millions within hours, so there's always a steady supply. It's easy to genetically engineer, and large numbers of the rod-shaped viruses naturally orient themselves into well-ordered films, much the way that chopsticks align themselves in a box.

 

The scientists increased the virus's piezoelectric strength. They used genetic engineering to add four negatively charged amino acid residues to one end of the helical proteins that coat the virus. These residues increase the charge difference between the proteins' positive and negative ends, which boosts the voltage. The scientists further enhanced the system by stacking films composed of single layers of the virus on top of each other. They found that a stack about 20 layers thick exhibited the strongest piezoelectric effect.

 

The team created the conditions for genetically engineered viruses to spontaneously organize into a multi-layered film that measures about 1 cm2. This film was then sandwiched between two gold-plated electrodes, which were connected to an liquid-crystal display. When pressure is applied to the generator it produces up to 6 nA at about 400 mV. That's enough energy to flash the number "1" on the LCD display.

The paper, "Virus-based piezoelectric energy generation," appeared as an advance online publication on Nature Nanotechnology's website (www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.69.html).

   

 

Below is a Video Link

 

 

 http://www2.electronicproducts.com/Virus_based_piezoelectric_energy_generator-video-1644580894001.aspx 

 

   

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5) Cancer: Energy Cravings could be its undoing

 15 September 2011 by Linda Geddes, New Scientist,

 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128303.800-cancers-cravings-could-be-its-undoing.html  

  

  

FOR 80 years we have misunderstood the feeding habits of cancer. It's a controversial suggestion that, if correct, could open up a host of alternative ways to fight the killer disease, and may even mean that in some circumstances chemotherapy drugs promote tumour growth rather than inhibit it.

In the 1930s, Otto Warburg suggested that cancer cells produce the bulk of their energy by breaking down glucose in the absence of oxygen, a process called glycolysis. The Warburg effect, as it is called, is now widely accepted in cancer research. It is also incorrect, according to Michael Lisanti at the Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lisanti thinks that when a cell turns cancerous it begins to spew out hydrogen peroxide. The free radicals this generates cause oxidative damage that prompts support cells in the connective tissue around the cancer cells to begin digesting themselves (see diagram). Once these support cells, called fibroblasts, have consumed the mitochondria that normally provide their energy, they switch to glycolysis. The cancer cells then feed off the nutrients glycolysis generates.

"It's the Warburg effect, but in the wrong place," says Lisanti, who presented the idea earlier this month at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence meeting in Cambridge,UK. "Cancer cells can feed off normal cells as a parasite." In fact, he says, cells infected with malaria behave in much the same way. "The malaria parasite enters cells, induces oxidative stress, and gets free food" by feeding off the structures inside host cells that self-digest as a result of the stress.

" Future of EnergyThe importance of the micro-environment is something that has been gaining recognition over the last few years," says Nic Jones of the Paterson Institute in Manchester, and chief scientist for Cancer Research UK. "This adds a very important and exciting twist, where the communication between the cancer cell and the fibroblast fuels the development of the tumour."

This form of "metabolic coupling" also mirrors the way in which the epithelial cells that make up the skin and the surface of the body's organs produce hydrogen peroxide during wound healing. In doing so they rally immune cells to repair the damage - but in cancer the signal is never turned off. "Cancer is a wound that doesn't heal, because it keeps on producing hydrogen peroxide," says Lisanti

He has experimental data to support his radical idea. When his team cultured breast cancer cells alongside fibroblasts for five days, they spotted the cancer cells releasing hydrogen peroxide on day two. By day five, most free radicals generated by the hydrogen peroxide were found inside the fibroblasts (Cell CycleDOI: 10.4161/cc.9.16.12553). The team also found a reduction in mitochondrial activity in fibroblasts, consistent with the cells self-destructing. There was also an increase in glucose uptake by the fibroblasts - a sign of glycolysis (Cell CycleDOI: 10.4161/cc.10.15.16585).

Lisanti is now gathering evidence to find out whether his ideas can be applied to many cancers or just a few. He has discovered a "marker" to identify patients in whom the metabolic coupling is occurring: as the fibroblasts are destroyed they stop producing a protein called caveolin-1. Lisanti has recorded a drop in caveolin-1 levels in 40 to 50 per cent of patients with breast cancer, and loss of the protein correlates with early tumour recurrence, metastasis, and resistance to the drug, tamoxifen (Breast Cancer ResearchDOI: 10.1186/bcr2892). He also has evidence for caveolin-1 loss in prostate cancer. Those results suggest that new cancer therapies based around Lisanti's ideas might be possible (see "The cells that die so cancer can live").

Lisanti believes the reason Warburg got it wrong is because he looked at cancer cells in isolation, rather than in co-culture with fibroblasts.

"The provocative use of the term 'reverse Warburg' is certainly catchy," says Chi Van Dang of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland - but it ignores some important observations. For example, many previous studies have found increased glycolysis in cancer cells.

Lisanti's model also runs into problems when taking the long view. "If these [fibroblasts] are sacrificing themselves so that the cancer can eat, sooner or later they are going to be completely depleted. And that doesn't happen," says Ian Hart of Barts Cancer Institute in London, UK. It is possible that tumours recruit stem cells from the bone marrow to replace the fibroblasts, but Hart says more evidence is needed to confirm this.

However, if Lisanti is correct, his ideas could also explain why people become more susceptible to cancer as they age. More than 100 years ago, Steven Paget proposed that cancer cells are seeds that need the correct micro-environment in which to grow. "What we're now saying is that the hydrogen peroxide is the fertiliser," says Lisanti. "As you age, your body produces more hydrogen peroxide and free radicals and becomes a fertile ground for cancer."

The cells that die so cancer can live

For decades, cancer therapies have focused on destroying cancer cells and ignored the healthy cells tumours also contain. The discovery that cancer cells form a parasitic relationship with the "nest" of fibroblasts or support tissue that surrounds the tumour may therefore open up other opportunities for treating the disease.

"So far, all mainstream cancer therapies are aimed at [removing] these transformed cells," says Ian Hart of Barts Cancer Institute in London, UK. "Rather than killing every last tumour cell, let's modify the [fibroblasts]."

In his model, Michael Lisanti at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, proposes that cancer cells use hydrogen peroxide to strike up their metabolic relationship with the fibroblasts. The chemical generates free radicals in the fibroblasts, kick-starting a self-digestion process which frees up nutrients to fuel cancer growth. His team found that treating cancer cells with catalase, an enzyme that destroys hydrogen peroxide, triggered a five0fold increase in cancer cell death, possibly by cutting off the cells' fuel supply.

This raises the prospect of treating cancer with antioxidants, which mop up free radicals. However, although some studies hint that antioxidants may be beneficial, particularly for cancer prevention, the results have often been disappointing, says Hart.

Killer free radicals

Lisanti thinks that's because most chemotherapies work by generating lethal doses of free radicals to kill the cancer cells, which would cancel out the effects of any antioxidant treatments. He believes we need trials of antioxidants alone, rather than in combination with chemotherapy.

If he is correct it is also possible that in some situations, chemotherapy might help cancer spread by making more fuel available to the cancer cells.

"Conventional chemotherapy saved my father from colon cancer, but when it does not work, you get recurrence and metastasis," says Lisanti. "There is a lot of luck involved here, ensuring that you got just the right dose."

Hart believes a more promising approach might be to target specific molecules that enable cross-talk between cancer cells and fibroblasts.

One possibility is using drugs that block "autophagy", the process by which the fibroblasts self-digest and release nutrients that then fuel cancer growth. The malaria drug, chloroquine, works in this way, so could also be tested against cancer, says Lisanti.

Drugs that inhibit the ability of mitochondria to burn lactate and other products of glycolysis may also serve to cut off the tumour's food supply. One such drug is metformin, widely prescribed to treat diabetes. Indeed, several recent studies have suggested that people taking metformin have a reduced risk of developing cancer (GastroenterologyDOI: 10.1053/j.gastro.2009.04.013).

 

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