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Science

Mining Metals Using Plants and Trees? 207

Posted by Hemos from the storing-up-the-evil dept.
elroySF writes "An MIT Technology Review article says "...Scientists reported Monday that they have bioengineered a plant capable of absorbing arsenic from soil and sequenced the complete set of genes for a microbe that can remove heavy metals from water." It goes on to say "...Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil." " We had a story about this a while back.
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Mining Metals Using Plants and Trees? More

Mining Metals Using Plants and Trees?

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  • Let's just hope it's not a fruit tree... (Score:5, Funny)

    by DaedalusLogic ( 449896 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:07PM (#4413214)
    Can you imagine you walk into an arsenic mine that looks like a peach orchard and decide to sample the goods?

  • Already happens? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sbeitzel ( 33479 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:09PM (#4413230) Homepage Journal
    It's cool that people are engineering plants and critters to concentrate these potentially toxic compounds...but what happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.

    Also, some plants already concentrate arsenic in their seeds. (It's been a while since I heard this, but I seem to recall it's either apples or apricots.)

    Oh yeah. First post!
    • i think i read somewhere that apple seeds contain trace amounts of cyanide, may just be an urban legend though

      • Re:Already happens? (Score:5, Informative)

        by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:50PM (#4413461) Journal
        Cyanide facts:

        There are 0.6 mg/g hydrogen cyanide (HCN) in dried apple seeds. Cite [cornell.edu]

        Natural cyanide is called Amygdalin, chemically it is bonded to a glucose and readily converts to hydrogen cyanide in the body. Herbal places sell it as a miracle cure for cancer. "Amygdalin Tablets & Ampoules www.cytopharma.com" This was an ad that came up during a google search related to cyanide.

        50 to 100 mg of cyanide is a lethal dose. Cite [emedicine.com]

        This is about a half-cup to a full cup (80-160grams) of dried apple seeds.

        An interesting site on cyanide. [charter.net]

        Related:
        Smoking of cigarettes commonly releases cyanide. Tobacco smokers have a mean blood cyanide level of 0.4 mcg/cc, which is 2.5 times greater than the level in nonsmokers. Cite [emedicine.com]

        • Some apple seeds a day may bring the coronor your way?

          if you want to get rid of someone - hold an apple seed eating contest at your next party!
        • Perhaps the best cyanide fact to keep in mind is that before you die of cyanide poisoning, you'll probably get extremely ill and at that point you can still be saved by drinking some sodium thiosulphate. Almost any photo shop will have some. If you're working with cyanide keep some handy. It's easy to come by.
    • Yeah, to me, this looks like a first step. The goal should be a plant/organism that sucks up the nasty stuff and then synthesizes/metabolizes it into something benign, or even useful. Otherwise, you've cleaned things up, but still have to dispose of the stuff....
      • Yeah, to me, this looks like a first step. The goal should be a plant/organism that sucks up the nasty stuff and then synthesizes/metabolizes it into something benign, or even useful. Otherwise, you've cleaned things up, but still have to dispose of the stuff....

        The metals in question are elements. Unless you can geneticly engineer the plant to also be a nuclear reactor you are rather stuck with them.
    • Apples, peaches, apricots, cherries and almonds are the species i know that do this, i think tehy're all in the same family or genus
    • What happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.
      An article I read in Science News many years ago suggested that the plants could then be carefully incinerated (at an optimal temperature, filters on the smokestack, etc.) and the heavy metals retrieved for later use. (This was on using particular varieties of weeds to pull heavy metals out of toxic waste sites.)
    • It's cool that people are engineering plants and critters to concentrate these potentially toxic compounds...but what happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.

      Which is easier said than done. We already have problems with genetically modified crop plants winding up as weeds in other farmers' fields. So it's highly likely that such plants would "escape" and quite possibly form hybrids with other plants of the same species.
  • "Money doesn't grow on trees!"

    Now I can finally reply, Some of them got GOLD leaves!!!

  • Cool (Score:2)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 )
    almost neo-alchemy, this would be great though, mining has really destroyed a lot of the environment around my state (wisconsin), most people think mining is physically diging out ore deposits and whatnot, actually IIRC current mining tecniques involve pumping poisins into the soil that deslove whatever minerals they want then they pump them back up and extract what they want
    • its called leach mining - and yes they use a lot of very poisonous compounds to get out the metals.

      The sad thing is that the amount of soil they ruin for a gram of gold is enormous. IIRC its like couple grams of gold per ton of soil. In order to get the gold out they pour arsenic or cyanide (cant remember which) through the soil.

      Near carson city nevada there are still large pools of this shit just sitting there.

  • METAL FIXING PLANTS (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I read an article in New Scientist several years ago about how the British authorities have planted a number of metal fixing plants in the vicinity of the Firth bridge to absorb the residue from the noxious paint used on the bridge.
  • If spraying our forests and fields wasn't enough, we are going to unleash plants that can extract dangerous compounds from the earth, for our animals to later eat?

    • Re:Dangerous to the eco-system? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sniggly ( 216454 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:31PM (#4413371) Journal
      Quite the reverse, I am quite positive these species have been engineered to clean landfills of heavy metals that are otherwise very difficult to extract. There is no other direct reason to engineer plants other than the mining benefit. The mining benefit is very likely commercially, but definately politically, secondary to cleaning (often suburban) areas of waste.
  • The plant efficiently pumps arsenic from the soil and stores it in its leaves, where it can be easily harvested and disposed of.

    Presumably, said plant is efficiently pumping arsenic from a Superfund site containing large amounts of..."disposed" arsenic!

    Do I detect circular logic here?

    WHERE THE HELL DO YOU DUMP THE PLANTS? (Another Superfund site?)

    • Re:Gotta love those MIT brains... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:22PM (#4413318)
      Make all the jokes you want, but it's all about a concentration process.

      Yes, you pump arsenic from a disposal site, but the arsenic in that waste will probably be low concentration (just ppm in solids is considered bad).

      Imagine that the plant sucks up *all* the arsenic from the soil, and *just* the arsenic. Thousands of tons of crap, which contain a few hundred pounds of arsenic, all of which goes into leaves. You then harvest the plants, put them into compost, shovel out a nice barrel full of arsenic into a secured container for burial, and have your nice thousands of tons of crap cleaned of arsenic. All the arsenic is still there, it's just become a smaller, more manageable problem.

      Arsenic is an *element* (although what most people consider arsenic is Arsenolite, As2O3. Arsenic as As metal is pretty rare to find naturally), until you get that whole alchemy thing going and you transmute it into iron, there are no decent forms of arsenic that are completely safe. Everything is about concentration and containment.

      • All the arsenic is still there, it's just become a smaller, more manageable problem.

        It does not even have to be a problem, but rather a resource. Perhaps arsenic is not that useful, but any metal certainly is.

        Tor

        • Re:Gotta love those MIT brains... (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Yes, they use arsenic in hi-frequency RF transistors (GaAsFET's), glass making, and other things but to be honest, there's lots of arsenic in the world already. They really don't need to go after a lot more. The other big use for arsenic used to be pressure treated lumber (copper-chromate-arsenate or CCA wood). Problem is it's not great when the wood gets disposed of (never burn pressure treated CCA wood, it makes arsenolite). I think the european union won't even take CCA wood, and use things like CBA (bromine something or other, but not arsenic in it). The market for that arsenic is about to disappear, if it hasn't already.

          The issue with Arsenic metal is that it very easily oxidizes back to As2O3 again.

          I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying that the supply of arsenic mega-outstrips its current demand.

      • Plants are engineered to suck up arsenic from the ground. They're planted on a landfill somewhere.

        Random insects come and nibble at the tree. They burrow holes in the bark. They feed on the roots. These insects ingest the arsenic you are removing, and... insert it into the ecosystem.

        Birds eat the insects from the tree, concentrating the arsenic inside themselves. Mosquitoes feed on the birds. Birds of prey or, perhaps snakes, eat the birds and their eggs. Leaves from the tree are blown off by a strong storm, landing in a nearby lake, and contaminating it with arsenic.

        Arsenic finds its way into the ecosystem on a macro scale, and starts wreaking havoc.

        Plants are the foundation of the ecosystem. Using them to harvest toxic chemicals is a BAD IDEA. You can never keep the area completely quarantined. You can never ensure that no insects or animals will feed upon the plants as they are growing.

        If this ever comes to pass, expect to see local ecosystem poisoning on a massive scale around the test sites.
        • Plants already suck up arsenic from the ground. In fact, garden vegetables which have absorbed toxic levels of heavy metals are a common cause of chronic illness in areas with contaminated soils. The fact that plants do this in the first place make it relatively easy to crank the tendency up a few notches.

          Toxic heavy metals already pervade our ecosystem, generally in concentration that make it difficult to remove them. As has already been stated, anything that can take these low concentration (but still dangerous) contaminations and turn them into high concentrations that can be safely removed somewhere is a good thing.

          Arsenic can't find its way into the ecosystem in a "macro scale" unless its there in the first place...the soil and the groundwater are very much part of the ecosystem. But in this case, presumable some, in fact large amounts, of the arsenic has been removed when the plants are harvested.

          If the test sites are heavily contaminated in the first place, you can bet local ecosystem poisoning has already happened.

          As far as "mining" via plants...do you think really think that strip mining would be LESS hard on the environment? Unless the world magically reverts to the stone age, people are going to want metals, and until something better are is introduced, there's little incentive for them to stop doing what works for them already...

        • You plant the arsenic loving cabbage and harvest and concentrate some of the leaves. This *removes* arsenic from that local ecosystem.
          You don't plant the arsenic loving cabbage and the arsenic stays in that local ecosystem. The levels may be lower than for insects nibbling on the cabbage, but it's permanent and pervasive.
          In concentrated pure form, the toxic chemicals are *valuable*. The problem is when they are low concentrations and mixed with a lot of other toxic chemicals.
          Besides, plants make some of the more interesting toxic chemicals themselves.

    • MIT did not just think this up. On my desk I have Volume 1, Issue 1 (March, 1999) of the International Journal of Phytoremediation (ISSN15522-6514). The science of phytoremediation is the study on how plants and there associated rhizosphere microbial communities deal with contaminants.

      The science of phytoremediation is not new. The US military has studied it for years as a method to clean up metal contaminated soils at gun ranges. One of the problems of phytoremediation with inorganic contaminants (such as lead or aresnic) is what to do with the plants after the remediation program. They can be just as hard to dispose of as the metal contaminated soil. I believe the lead concentrations in one barley crop was so high that they sold the "harvest" to a smelter!!

    • The plants are probably just a first step.

      Obviously, you harvest the plants and cart them away once they have done their work.

      You could burn the plants under controlled conditions and chemically extract the arsenic -- a metal, as I recall -- from the ash.

      Even if you didn't burn 'em:

      If the plants are really concentrating the stuff, you'll have far less waste to deal with. Say, ten tons of branches and leaves rather than one hundred tons of soil. They might still end up in barrels in dumps, but there will be far fewer barrels.
    • No, the logic is straightforward. Arsenic, PCBS and other chlorinated compounds, toxic metals, etc., in the ground can get into the groundwater, and they're *very* hard to extract in situ. Once sequestered in lignin-based tissue (i.e., structural wood) they are (i) out of the ground, (ii) will not get in the groundwater, and (iii) amenable to further treatment. The ideal solution would be *poof!* and the toxins vanish; since we can't' do that, this is a pretty damn good one.

      Incidentally, non-engineered plants do this as well. Populus (aspen and the like) is particularly good at it.
      • As are carrots. Be VERY wary of very inexpensive carrots. In the same right be very wary of food made from fertilizer made from scrubbers in smoke stacks. If you aren't outraged your not paying attention. Check out Physicians for social responsibility.

        F34nor

  • Marketing Idea (Score:4, Funny)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:11PM (#4413246) Journal
    Genetically Engineered Arsenic Tobacco - Jack Kervorkian Chew!

    It's the choice of an old and tired generation!

    Chew on this!

    Feeling down? Don't stick around! Genetically Engineered Arsenic Tobacco - Jack Kervorkian Chew!

    oh I forgot...

    2. ???
    3. Profit!

  • System : Biosphere
    Critical Values ('there are no Monotone Values in Biology' G. Bateson Mind & Nature '
    homeostatsis
    runaway
    positive feedback (sex and death)
    negative feedback
    good luck
  • This is more along the lines of cleanup or bioremediation, where organic methods of agglutinating very disperse amounts of something dangerous (heavy metals, arsenic, etc. in the soil/aquifer/etc.) into larger, more manageable clumps without disposing of the substrate wholesale. The article mentions things like cleaning up oil spills with bacteria and removing toxic metals from soil. This isn't a technique to remove large, concentrated deposits of metals from the ground, it's actually much the opposite: it removes scattered, relatively small amounts from the environment in a way that facilitates their safe(r) disposal.

  • From a mining perspective (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zipster ( 555990 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:13PM (#4413263)
    Considering I work for a mining company I guess I have some background knowledge.

    What I would like to know is how they plan to get the base minerals, considering soils have tyically minimal mineralization and the elements tend to be in very low concentrations.

    I would think that this would only work for rare earth elements and the like, not so good for base metals.

    Still, after seeing what mining does to the landscape, anything is better.

  • Think of it! Now you can potentially go do your environmental duty and turn a profit. Bob Q Genesplicer buys up the rights to the tailings from a mine..and just goes out to harvest once per x time period.

    They're right to be concerned about the spread of the genes, but if they were to tie in a sterility gene (the so-called terminator technology might be an example of this) very closely to the gene that adds this new behavior, I think we're really underway!

  • Just watch out for the Silver Tree . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by StefanJ ( 88986 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:19PM (#4413304) Homepage Journal
    . . . or you'll end up like Stan here:

    http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_683401.html
  • Plant a tree... build resources... conquer your enemy.
    Time to resign!

  • Bacteria that "breathe" heavy metals (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When the bacteria breathe out, they take pollutants such as
    uranium and chromium that are dissolved in water and turn them into solids that the bacteria leave behind. The solids then can be removed. [emphasis added]
    How long will it be until some madman gets a hold of a cheap biological method for enriching uranium?

  • Anyone else see that this is an USA Today article? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by perrin5 ( 38802 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:26PM (#4413347) Homepage
    Does anyone have any more useful links than this one? I know it's in Nature, so there's probably not a free site that directly links the article, but are there any more brain heavy synopses of this article anywhere?

    I am interested in several things:
    1) what does the Arsenic turn into (chemically speaking). Does the plant change the chemical bonding? I think that most aresnic is stored as sodium arsenate (I could be wrong) if it changes it to something more managable, it would be much better than if it simply concentrates it. HOWEVER, concentrating it is, by itself, an incredible step forward. Period.

    2) is it possible to seed these as "suicide" plants, EG: plants that produce no pollen or seeds?
  • I've heard that fast growing mustard seed plants have been used to remove lead compounds from contaminated soil.

    Also isn't it the Monarch Butterfly that deposits 24k gold bands on the outside of it's chrysalis?

    I think we as a species are doing a very poor job of taking advantage of some of the biology going on around us.

    We're not seeing the forest through the trees so to speak.

    • Apparently, yes, mustard plants have been used to remove lead from soil, with what success I don't know.

      As for the Monarch, the gold color [learner.org] on its chrysalis "comes from cardenolides in the milkweed that larvae eat." Sorry.

  • A Demonstration of Ignorance. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by core plexus ( 599119 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:30PM (#4413369) Homepage
    "...Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil." That demonstrates why some people calling themselves 'scientists' should stick to their fields. Sucking up miniscule amounts of metals with plants would only deplete the 'crustal abundance' of minerals within the narrow range of plant roots, and the average American requires over 45,000 pounds of newly-mined minerals every year. I work in the mineral industry, and I am a scientist. This smells like a grant proposal that got by someone. Suckers!
    • ...and the average American requires over 45,000 pounds of newly-mined minerals every year.

      Wuut? Cleter. I think I'm gonna try out that new fangled calcumalator I bawwt last year. Lemme se. foooorty-fiyve thousand, wheh! that's a biggun, hit that there divide key, how many days in a year, Cleter? 365? Is dat right. Alright. Where wuz I. Right. That divide button. And three-hunndrid-sixty-fiyve! Holly, hell, Cleter! The avrage 'merican eats 128 pounds a food a day. I'll be. I ate that much, I wouldn't be crappin' for a week, now would I?

      Yeee haww.

      C//
      • Wuut? Cleter. I think I'm gonna try out that new fangled calcumalator I bawwt last year. Lemme se. foooorty-fiyve thousand, wheh! that's a biggun, hit that there divide key, how many days in a year, Cleter? 365? Is dat right. Alright. Where wuz I. Right. That divide button. And three-hunndrid-sixty-fiyve! Holly, hell, Cleter! The avrage 'merican eats 128 pounds a food a day. I'll be. I ate that much, I wouldn't be crappin' for a week, now would I?

        It's an average figure... obviously some Americans will be using billions of pounds of newly mined minerals (you know, people who own steel mills, oil refineries and so forth) then selling it on to the rest of the country. Some of those will be shipyards, auto factories, civil engineers and so on, each of which will sell on its products.

        What is the ratio of the weight of the minerals in a skyscraper to the weight of the workers in that skyscraper? What about a ship? Even an ordinary SUV is a few thousand pounds of minerals. 45000 lbs/person is not an unreasonable figure at all.

    • ...and the average American requires over 45,000 pounds of newly-mined minerals every year. I work in the mineral industry, and I am a scientist. This smells like a grant proposal that got by someone. Suckers!

      That is an amazing stat. This is the raw ore you are talking about?

      • If you really think about it, mining is the root of all industries. As I mentioned previously, there would not be computers without mining and more importantly, miners. (People have dehumanized miners by referring to the 'mining industry'). Nor would there be modern agriculture (irrigation, equipment, transportation, fertilizers, etc. etc.), healthcare (instruments, medicines, equipment, transportation, brick, glass, steel, etc.) and...well you get the point. The steel nails in your house, the steel blades to cut the wood, the copper wires to transfer the electricity...ok, ok.
    • However, if "microorganisms" is substituted for "trees and grasses", then this is not science fiction but inductrial fact. Now it is true that currently this is used for second stage processing on piles that have already been crushed and ground into small pieces rather than for the actual mining process, but it is not such a stretch to imagine introducing the little beasties directly into the ore-body in due course. And way preferable to digging holes and expecting people to work inside them.

  • Salinity (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What we need in Oz is a tree that can stand high salinity and absorb some of the excess salt to help fix the problems caused by over irrigation. It's going to take a very long time to fix with natural plants.

  • Misleading. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:38PM (#4413409) Journal

    The topic of this article is highly misleading. One would think plants were capable of mining for metals like iron, copper or various mined good, while the real use is cleaning up the soil from any heavy-metal contamination, such as the arsenic example. A more practical use in the local neighbohrhood for this would be to clean the ground around older gas stations or clean the ground of heavy-metals where there used to be a steel mill.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Talk about wasted effort! (Score:5, Funny)

    by bobdehnhardt ( 18286 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:40PM (#4413416)
    The first group of researchers added a gene from the E. coli bacteria and one from soybeans to make Arabidopsis thaliana, a distant relative of cabbage, develop its taste for arsenic.... The plant efficiently pumps arsenic from the soil and stores it in its leaves, where it can be easily harvested and disposed of.

    Oh, sure, as if cabbage didn't taste bad enough already....

    • hmmm... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My mother in law likes coleslaw...

  • This is nothing new (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @07:44PM (#4413431)
    This is nothing new. Many companies have been doing this for a very long time.

    Here is a /. article from last week on this
    http://science.slashdot.org/science/02/09/30 /16472 02.shtml?tid=126

    Ocen Arks International:
    http://www.oceanarks.org/LM/Framer LM.html

    a decent Wired.com article:
    http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,1 282,6908,0 0.html

    also see: http://www.berea.edu/sens/living_machine.htm

    The Buckminster Fuller Institute
    http://www.bfi.org/Trimtab/fall00/living_machine s. htm

    This UK company
    http://www.ltluk.com/

    a Battelle Enviro Update article
    http://www.battelle.org/Environment/publi cations/E nvUpdates/Summer98/article5.html

    An article from HUD
    http://www.hud.gov/local/boi/ie100601.html

    The notice from the 1993 confrence on living machines:
    http://www.ibiblio.org/london/agriculture/biorem ed iation/1/msg00000.html

    Some info from LSU
    http://www.biology.lsu.edu/webfac/cramcharan/ refle ction/articles/waste/machine.html

    Rockbourne Enviro
    http://www.rockbourne.net/WastewaterTreatm ent/livi ngmachines.html

    Korte Organica
    http://www.korte.hu/technologies/living_machine. ht ml

    This Time.com article
    http://www.time.com/time/reports/environm ent/heroe s/heroesgallery/0,2967,todd,00.html
  • The truely terrifing aspects are the use of microbes to refine Uranium from simple mine tailings. (Wired Mag.)

    I dream of landfills being mined by Von Neuman Machines and gene taylored bacteria. I of the silica trees of Naussca cleaning the plutonium out of the soil. I dream of the darkness between the stars.

    F34nor
    -If we stay on this rock we're all going to die.
  • One method of removing heavy metals from a heavily polluted area(old factory site, for example) is to plant the entire grounds with trees. Soft pines are often used, for example. As the trees grow and absorb minerals through their roots, they take up almost all of the polluting metals over time and store them in their needles and bark.

    There are companies that can be hired to plant and maintain small "cleaning forests" over a period of ten to twenty years, to make sure no one else is harvesting the lumber, and to treat or remove trees that become ill. It's actually very useful, a cheap, efficient(compared to digging up the soil and chemically treating it), and very clean method of getting dangerous substances out of the ground.
  • Maybe this phenomena causes the same thing that has caused vitamin levels to drop in fruits and vegetables [wkrn.com]
  • I've got a great idea... let's genetically engineer high-order sea animals to accumulate PCBs and other pollutants, to help clean up our waterways!

    Oh, wait, they already do that. Um, yay! ;P

  • for my GOLD tree!
  • Why am I reminded of command and conquer, and the concept of Tiberium? [everything2.com]
  • If I recall correctly, they've been using sunflowers in New Jersey to clean up superfund sites. Could there be a way, therefore, to use such plants for nuclear waste/contamination areas, for later harvest and recycling/reclamation/disposal? After all, certain instances of radioactive waste includes metallic compounds.

  • in the original C&C there were plants that did this (at least i was always led to believe they were plants)--they extracted all manner of valuable metals and secreted it in the form of crystals...mind you those things were highly toxic and energetic enough that humans would combust upon prolonged exposure but hey, its just a game= =)
  • Unless they made the plant somehow resistant to arsenic, aren't we basically engineering it to commit suicide for our benefit? Granted, it is just a plant, but aren't there some unsettling moral connotations of this? There has never been an organism that has acted in this way. This plant is probably the first decidedly non-human "unnatural" life on this planet.
  • "What happened to the car son?"
    "Sorry Dad! I left it outside in the rain - the moss got to it and chewed up all the sheetmetal!"
  • ...genetically engineered a goose whose digestive system can separate metals from other compounds in ore. They are processed by the goose and then are used as raw material for egg production.

    "We've had success with a number of elements", reports Dr. Grimm of the University of California at Berkeley, "but we've had the greatest success with metals, especially nonreactive metals." His competitor at Sandia National Labs, Dr. Anderson, isn't quite as confident. "Golden egg laying geese! That's just the stuff of fairytales".

  • A week or so ago there was a story on CBC Radio (http://www.cbc.ca [www.cbc.ca]) about Inco (large nickel miner) using Alyssum plants on nickel-rich soil. Apparently, this plant just sucks nickel up to the point where nickel amounts to 2% of the biomass at harvest!

    There's a short article [canadianmi...ournal.com] on the findings and also some mention of the concept of phytomining.

  • "...Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil." ...That sounds suspiciously familiar to this one scheme I've heard of that people apparently have been doing for centuries. They plant these special "seeds" in the ground that grow and harvest tons of minerals. When the plant is big enough and the time is right, they EAT it. Fugging weirdos.

  • Seems dumb (Score:3, Insightful)

    by giminy ( 94188 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2002 @08:34PM (#4413675) Homepage Journal
    A large amount of our water problems have to do with burning fossil fuels with heavy metals. Why? Plants have always been pretty at good at absorbing nasty stuff like arsenic, mercury, etc. We burn the coal/oil/whatever, and that stuff goes into the atmosphere, gets absorbed by clouds, and then gets into the water cycle. Then we find this stuff in the our water and fish [usgs.gov].

    It gets in the fish because algae and water lilys also absorb the metals pretty well. Then fish eat the algae...Note that if you live in the Northeast US (like I used to), you can't eat freshwater fish anymore. All the lakes (with a few exceptions) are polluted with mercury, even the ones far far away from industrial factories.

    So modifying plants to absorb more heavy metals is just going to cause problems for 1) future generations (granted it takes a helluva long time for plants to die and make coal, but still...), and 2) current people who hunt for food (like when Mr. Deer comes over and nibbles on that arsenic-laden blueberry bush).

    Since when is taking toxic material out of the ground and letting it sit on the surface (where rain washes it into rivers, animals eat it...people eat it) a good idea? Maybe it will keep it out of aquafers in the short term, but it is still going to cause more problems than it's worth.
  • Sounds like Tiberain Plants to me.

  • ok, so the article claims the cabbagey plant can absorb aresenic into its leaves, and then the plant can be disposed of. How? Isn't that how arsenic got there in the first place?

    I suppose they would seal it into steel drums, or maybe bury it, but then you end up with a giant pile of supertoxic waste instead of minute amounts of it all over.

    i dooon't get it.
  • and there are currently two main uses for it, cleanup of heavy and toxic metals eg arsnic, lead, platinum etc and mining. I was listening to the CBC the other night and they had a representative from a Canadian mining company on talking about their pilot for the first commercial scale mining using hyperaccumulating plants to remove extra metal from mining trailings. He estimated that a very large scale deployment of a certain species that was a natural hyperacculutaor for whatever they were mining would increase their yields by aprox 5 percent which came out to some 10K tons a year! Not only that but the plant also accumulated some heavy metals used in the mining process and so would help clean up the site.
  • Mel Chin had already successfully done this in his work entitled "Revival Field" at the Pig's Eye Landfill in St. Paul Minnesota. Here he traps heavy metals and toxins in the soil leaving it untainted when he is done harvesting... at least that is the goal.. and so far it has been somewhat sucessfull. You can read more about it here satorimedia.com [satorimedia.com]. I'm sure there are other articles out there about his research, but I found him in one of my text books entitled Art on the Edge and Over by Linda Weintraub....

  • Ever since I read in the World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid that the ocean contains something like 9 pounds of gold for every man, woman and child I've wondered when somebody would find a way to get it. I know people have been working on it, and I had heard about evidence of a naturally occuring gold-fixing bacterium before. Apparently, some ores contain gold structures that look like organs or excrement from bacteria.

    Just Google using gold/ocean/bacteria as search terms and you'll find some interesting stuff.

    This is why I laugh when some idiot on CNBC says "gold is a good investment". Not only has it been a crappy investment historicly, but mining tech is always improving. One good breakthrough to get the gold out of seawater and poof! It's just that gold has been doing well lately, so now you've actually got people pitching gold the way they pitched dot-coms.

    However, I can understand why the gold stocks make sense. When the price of gold goes up just a little, pits that were worthless suddenly become valuable. Paradoxicly, companies with low grade ore pits actually get a bigger boost (of course it works painfully in the other direction when the price of gold falls).

    So, if you don't believe that companies that rely on a valuable commodity won't find a way to make it cheaper coughChipFabscough! then by all means buy gold and sock it away in your basement.

  • make fertilizer, so we can grow more plants, so we can make more fertilizer, so we can. . .

    Isn't this what the ad said was wrong with cocaine?

    KFG
  • Think about it. What they really need to clean up the Chernobyl site in the Ukraine would be a bacterium that (a) is radiation resistant (a bunch of pre-existing candidates are already known), and (b) selectively concentrates certain elements (probably you'd need a couple of strains; one for the actinides such as plutonium, and a couple of others for the lighter stuff -- IIRC there's still a lot of caesium 131 knocking around the Zone).

    Just build big bioreactors and feed megatons of topsoil into them. The end product should be clean soil and very, very radioactive [dead] bacteria, which can be treated as concentrated high level waste.

    (This would also come in handy in parts of Nevada and at the US military nuclear sites, where the problem is dealing with radioisotopes dispersed in the soil and ground water.)

  • Arthur C. Clarke described a "golden reef," in which several species of coral were genetically engineered to extract gold from sea water, in his book "Imperial Earth," published in 1976. In a rather detailed passage, he describes his corals as being up to ten per cent gold, but states that the gold extraction feature weakened the health of the coral, so that they suffered from parasitism and disease and required regular gardening and maintenance to remain viable.
  • During the 90's the UN dug a lot of wells in Pakistan and Northern India. It turns out that almost all of these wells are contaminated with arsenic. Drinking the well water is causing many people to develop cancer by the age of twenty but they have no alternative past trying to live off of small streams. Watering their crops and using the bathroom are introducing arsenic back into the surface soils. Economically it is devastating because their crops are becoming increasingly contaminated and even the people that don't develop cancer are too wasted to work hard. Biological remediation is the only alternative for an area of this scale.

    You can either gather the plants and burn them to concentrate the heavy metals or compost them and replant in the compost to concentrate the metals even more. The great thing about the plants is that they filter a lot of contaminated water (which essentially ends up as distilled rain) over their lifetime with out burning oil for industrial processing or using industrial chemicals. And it is cheep too.

    In developed areas there is a lot of lead contamination around old houses (lead paint) and cities (leaded gasoline), or mercury from florescent lights. Uranium from depleted bullets (which turn into a power aerosol upon impact) has just as strong a organiometallic effect as arsenic.

    All of these things can turn you madder than a hatter (this is an old phrase resulting from the use of mercury in the hat making industry at one time. Or as dull as a printer (lead pigment used in news paper ink until the unions forced a change). But it depends on which part of the brain dies first.

    These heavy metals have been used in a variety of things that people bring into their homes. In fact a large number of cosmetics are exceedingly poisonous because there are no regulations on what can be in them. Ever wonder what the active ingredient is in those hair dyes for men whose beards are turning white, its lead acetate. Remember, you are what you eat, drink and absorb through your skin. Moonshine isn't the only source of lead poisoning these days!

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