26Mayonnaise Energy
In 2017, after 1250 gallons of mayonnaise went bad at Michigan State University last year, the school’s Sustainability Officer used an anaerobic digester to turn it into energy and power part of the campus. In the anaerobic digester, microorganisms eat biodegradable waste and produce biogas, which can then be combusted into heat and electricity.
27. The ghost plants unlike most plants are white and do not contain chlorophyll. Instead of generating energy from sunlight, it is parasitic. It hosts certain fungi that are mycorrhizal with trees, meaning it ultimately gets its energy from photosynthetic trees.
28. Some sap-sucking sea slugs incorporate living chloroplasts from the algae they eat into their own bodies, allowing the slugs to temporarily live off of solar energy through photosynthesis. For this reason, they are also known as “solar-powered sea slugs.”
29. A blimp flying an entire week consumes the same amount of fuel as a 747 commercial jet uses to move away from the gate.
30. The National Trust in the USA implores us to stop urinating in a toilet, in order to save the water used in flushing, and instead wee onto compost heaps, which speeds up the chemical process of decomposition, making it a better fertilizer to grow vegetables and save even more energy in reducing food miles.
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31Brain Energy
The level of difficulty of a mental task, from working on a complex calculus equation to completing a simple game of Sudoku, barely alters the amount of energy the brain consumes while completing the task.
32. Termites are being researched as a possible renewable energy source as they can produce up to 2 liters of hydrogen from ingesting a single sheet of paper, making them one of the planet’s most efficient bioreactors.
33. Every second of every day, the sun converts 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium. The other 5 million tons becomes energy. Despite losing about 5 million tons of mass every second, it has only lost about 0.05% of its original mass over the past 4.5 billion years.
34. When two subatomic particles called “bottom quarks” fuse, they release more than 7 times the energy of individual fusion reactions in hydrogen bombs. The physicists who made this discovery kept it a secret until they were certain this discovery cannot be weaponized.
35. Assuming you eat 2000 calories a day (8,400,000 joules), you use, on average, 97.2 joules per second (97.2 watts). This means we are pretty much as powerful as a “bright light bulb.” So we run one of the more powerful computers in the known universe and an entire life support system that can transport itself and reproduce copies of itself while consuming the same amount of energy as a light bulb. We are remarkably efficient.
