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Squeezing Oil from Old Wells
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Oil fuels the lives of most people around the world. We use it to power our cars and planes, heat our homes, and even manufacture shoes, plastic bottles, and other products. Without it, the world would be a very different place.
Oil can be pumped out of the ground only in certain places, however, and there's a limited supply. Now, scientists have found an unusual way to squeeze additional crude oil out of wells that were thought to be tapped out. They're using microbes to help extract the trapped oil.
In the United States alone, about 380 billion barrels of oil lie buried underground in places that are hard to get to—trapped inside porous rocks, for example, or stuck to grains of sand.
Bacteria of a group known as Bacillus make a waste product that works like a laundry detergent. Adding such microbes to oil wells could release trapped oil in the same way that laundry detergent lifts stains out of clothing.
To test the idea in the lab, researchers injected a mixture of Bacillus bacteria and nutrients into a column of sand that also held oil. They found that, under the right conditions, the microbes unleashed up to 40 percent of the trapped oil.
Next, the research team shut off the oil pumps at a site near the town of Oil Center, Okla. In two oil wells, they injected a solution of Bacillus bacteria along with nutrients for the bacteria to live on. In two other wells, they injected just nutrients. And, in a fifth well, they injected only water.
The bacteria had 4 days to work their magic. Then, the scientists turned the pumps back on and collected liquid from each well.
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Dancing with Robots |
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Sprague's Sprockets, a team of two boys and two girls, waited nervously for its turn at the search-and-rescue station as the RoboCup Junior competition got under way.
The students from Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn, N.Y., had checked the settings on their robot's infrared sensors. They'd tweaked their computer program and loaded it into the robot. Soon, they would send the robot along a path with turns, obstacles, and even a ramp.
But team programmer Monica Furman, 11, seemed concerned. When I asked her whether the team was ready, she answered, "No." When I asked her what she was worried about, she said, "Everything." As it turned out, she was right.
When the team released its robot at the starting line, it stalled. Although the sensors and wheels appeared to be working, the robot wouldn't move along the path marked on the course in front of it.
The judges gave the Sprockets a few more chances. Nothing worked. It was back to the drawing board. "The program itself is so complicated," Furman said. "The robot got confused." |
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Computer brain |
| At RoboCup Junior, an all-day event held in late March at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in Manhattan, Sprague's Sprockets and the other teams worked through the challenges that all robot designers face.
The young engineers on each team needed to build a strong, reliable, mobile robot. And they had to give the robot's computer brain the information it would need to make good decisions about when to turn, when to stop, and how to move around an obstacle.
RoboCup Junior is a competitive event that allows students from elementary schools and high schools to test their robotics skills in one of three tasks. In addition to navigating a search-and-rescue course, competing robots can play soccer or take part in a dance contest.
"All the robots in RoboCup Junior are completely autonomous, which means that there are no remote controls," says Elizabeth Sklar. A professor of computer science at Brooklyn College, she organized the New York event. |
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