The electrical conveniences of modern life

First off the snooze alarm simply did not work; it has black fur and green eyes and was sure it was time for breakfast makers to get up. She was only an hour early, but would not reset. Then just as us lazy humans get stirring, the electricity goes out. Now this presents some interesting problems to solve perhaps without coffee, which itself is one of the problems. Fortunately the Phactors own an Italian range top coffee brewer and a gas range.  So there you go, coffee and hot milch easy as that but maybe that manual coffee grinder should have been kept?  Just enough ground coffee saved us.  Some Italian bread fried in a bit of butter solved the third problem. Fortunately the garage door can be opened fairly easily once you get inside to disengage the opener.  No lights was a great excuse to sit out on the patio to read the morning paper listening to a lonely house wren and looking at the iris and peonies in bloom. It was a bit like camping out and the lack of electricity was not a problem for most because they simply get coffee and breakfast out at a fast foodie place just like they get din-dins.  It was only a 2 hour outage in our extended neighborhood. But you had best make sure you are prepared for such things.  Next step would have been a camp stove and percolator.  

Bacterial fuel cell turns sewage into juice

Everytime you flush or put something down the sink disposal, energy is going down the drain.  BOD stands for biological oxygen demand, the amount of oxygen needed to turn all those carbon molecules into CO2 via aerobic respiration.  The world's best decomposers, bacteria, may accomplish this in a different way, anaerobically, which works but generally more slowly.  Now scientists have created a fuel cell that turns 13% of the energy in sewage into electricity. Now this is a great thing because now treating sewage costs energy rather than generating energy.  Image all that sewage sludge turned into electricity!  Wow!  This is very cool. Now maybe if some of those pig farms could just put their by-products into fuel cells, some akin to Bartertown's electrical system (Mad Max 3), now that would be progress if only an apocalypse can be avoided first.