New Research to Find Environment-Cleansing Bugs

Hop-Frog writes: "Here is a report on work going toward engineering bugs to cleanse the environment. There are bugs to eat carbon, toxic waste and more. This should please many people of a variety of political persuations."

Can't please all the people all of the time

[undeg chwech]

This should please many people of a variety of political persuations

Yeah ... it will please everyone who doesn't mind genetically engineered super-bacteria roaming the planet.

here we go

[tps12]

Okay, this is too much. How does no one recognize that it might not be the best idea to pour robotic, self-replicating bugs into our atmosphere?!? How long before the little bastards develop a taste for human flesh?

This is not the correct way to go about fixing the environment. Throwing technology at a problem caused by technology is not going to work. Rather, we need to simplify our lives. Take a page from the Indians, and start harvesting and hunting our own food. Walk or ride horseback instead of driving. Weave your own clothes from skins.

But don't don't don't develop flesh-eating microscoping robo-bugs!

Ringworld

[lonely]

Hi,

Just go through reading ringworld by Larry Niven, this had an interesting scenario of a dyson "ring" that had apparently lost it technology.

It turned out that all civilisation had been lost due to little microbes eat all there high temperature semiconductors. With not power all of a sudden it was not possible to boot-strap into any other form of technology.

One quote in the book was about the fact that on earth polythene had to be abbandoned as too many things have been trained to eat it. :-)

It'd be cool if....

[Snafoo]

Some big, suspicious corporation with many millions of dollars of PCB-filled waste containers slowly and secretly rusting in the Boston harbour could genetically engineer a microbe to take those PCBs and rip off the chlorine molecule so as to reduce the stuff to harmless saltwater.

But wait, this all sounds familiar...

Lead-lined cell walls?

[imkonen]

"Abraham hopes scientists can find a way to use the bacterium to clean up nuclear waste. "

Okay...I'll buy that you can make a hardier bacterium capable of withstanding high doses of radiation, but how is it actually going to CLEAN the waste? Radioactivity is a property of the individual atoms making up the waste. Digestion, even genetically engineered superbug digestion, is limited to making and breaking chemical bonds, not atom-smashing.

They already dump mutant bugs on oil spills, but that's because the difficulty there is recollecting all the oil, and the bugs can digest it and render it less harmfull to the environment. The key is that you don't have to go back later and clean up the bugs...they presumably die off when the oil is gone. The problem with nuclear waste isn't usually the spills so much as the fact that it has to be stored for 10000's of years before the radiation has dissipated enough. Even if you do have a nuclear waste spill and you dump some superbugs on it, you still have to clean up the now radioactive superbugs in order to remove the detrimental effects of the spill.

Cleaning up nuclear waste

[Veramocor]

IANANES (I am not a nuclear environmental specialist) but the bugs can do one of two things in nuclear waste. First clean up the non-nuclear hazerdous waste, like the bugs eating say PCBS in an area which is also radioactive. The second thing they can do is oxidize or reduce radioactive element. Say for instance you have radioactive element X with a valence charge of 2+, the bug reduces the element to a charge of 0. Thus the radioactive element, while still radioactive, may be less likely to leach with water further down into the ground.

Re:here we go

[Sgt York]

"We can make bugs that eat carbon dioxide"

Yeah, it's called ALGAE. It's just a minor one, though. Probably just the most common orgsanism on the planet by biomass.

As for the "trees where it is barren today" I'm all for it, provided those barren areas are the places we made barren