SSS 2009-09-14
时间：2019-01-08 作者：英语课 分类：Scientific American(九)月
If scientists have their way, we may someday be tapping maples 1—not for pancake fixin’s, but for power. Because researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle have found there’s enough electricity flowing in trees to run an electronic circuit.
If you’ve ever made a potato battery, you know that plant material can generate current. But the energy in trees is something else entirely 2. The potato experiment uses electrodes of two different metals to set up a charge difference that gets local electrons flowing.
But in the current study, researchers use electrodes made of the same material. Sticking one electrode into a tree and another in the soil, they found that big leaf maples generate a steady voltage of up to a few hundred millivolts. That’s way less than the volt-and-a-half provided by a standard AA battery. So the scientists designed a gadget 3 so small, with parts just 130 nanometers in size, that it can run on tree power alone. Their results appear in the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology.
If you’re nuts for renewable energy, you probably can’t get much greener than a forest full of electrici-tree.
—Karen Hopkin
- There are many maples in the park. 公园里有好多枫树。
- The wind of the autumn colour the maples carmine . 秋风给枫林涂抹胭红。
- The fire was entirely caused by their neglect of duty. 那场火灾完全是由于他们失职而引起的。
- His life was entirely given up to the educational work. 他的一生统统献给了教育工作。