MIT researchers work on repelling the bane of tropical-fish enthusiasts: Algae growing on the glass of their aquariums, but with the goal of reducing carbon emissions

MIT News reports researchers may have figured out how to keep algae from growing on glass surfaces: Coat the glass with "a material that can hold an electrostatic charge, and then applying a very small voltage to that layer," which in turn repels the algae, which have a negative charge on their cell surfaces.

The goal isn't to help tropical-fish enthusiasts, but to try to perfect a new kind of large-scale system for reducing carbon emissions, because algae consume carbon dioxide like nobody's business.

Theoretically, a large enough "photobioreactor" hooked up to a power-plant smokestack and filled with tanks or tubes full of algae could mean significant carbon-emission reductions.

The problem, as any aquarium owner knows, is that enough algae can take up home on the surfaces of the tanks or tubes to keep enough sunlight from reaching the less fortunate algae just floating around in the water, requiring frequent shutdowns to clean the surfaces, which limits just how much carbon the systems can extract.