Watermelon Powered Cars?

Posted by NG Kids in Green Scene on September 16, 2009
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Did you know that not all watermelons are sold for food? An incredible one-fifth of watermelons go to waste because they have too many scars or are shaped oddly. Wouldn’t it be great if something could be done with these rejected watermelons?

Wayne Fish, a chemist with the Agricultural Research Service in Lane, Oklahoma, and his team were working on a project using watermelons when they realized that watermelon juice could be used to make ethanol, which can be used as fuel for cars. It doesn’t matter how the watermelons look, because only the juice is used. Could watermelon juice be the fuel for a car you might drive one day?

Read more about this green (or is it red?) fuel on National Geographic News.

Put your own words into a photo of a woman eating watermelon on National Geographic Kids.

Photograph by Gareth Richards, My Shot

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Categories: Innovations

Comments

  1. cowgirlexplorer
    September 16, 2009, 6:46 pm

    Hay, I just learned about this on school, i think it is pretty cool if we can use things that are going to go to waste to help the environment!

  2. gohanpatel
    September 17, 2009, 11:42 am

    that’s good resarch for stop harm to environment.I like
    it.

  3. AnnanAmos
    September 23, 2009, 6:55 pm

    it isn’t TOO surprising. ethanol – I just learned this from my chemistry teacher- is the same thing as alcohol, like the kind that people drink. so if you have a fruit, or anything that can be “fermented” which is like rotting, then you can distill out the ethanol. they do the same thing as making moonshine, is what he said. He also said something like “that’s a lot like the fuel they put in race cars” and also that they power “the race cars with distilled ethanol, which is ironic because early NASCAR drivers were all moonshine runners in the early days.” That’s funny! hopefully they can make ethanol out of stuff that wasn’t supposed to be people’s food.

  4. arijamie
    May 6, 2010, 5:33 pm

    I love watermelon, but I never knew you could power a car with it!

  5. saamir11
    June 10, 2010, 2:07 pm

    yum water mellon one of my fav fruites

  6. j-ellobuddy
    July 30, 2010, 3:48 pm

    yummy,but that’s amazing that watermelon juice can make fuel.

  7. demon
    May 6, 2012, 6:04 pm

    sweet watermelon powered cars I wonder if you could drink the fuel ;o

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