Bacteria Used To Fix Cracked Concrete 177
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the UK's University of Newcastle have created a new type of bacteria that generates glue to hold together cracks in concrete structures — that means everything from concrete sidewalks to buildings that have been damaged by earthquakes. When the cells have been germinated, they burrow deep into the concrete until they reach the bottom. At this point, the concrete repair process is activated, and the cells split into three types that produce calcium carbonate crystals, act as reinforcing fibers, and produce glue which acts as a binding agent to fill concrete gaps."
Okay. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's officially "the future".
Re:Okay. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Okay. (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, when was this?!!!
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This is now.
I just want to know what happened to then.
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Dark Helmet and Sandurz come across an image of themselves viewing the screen. As they react, the screen mimics what they are doing]
Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at?! When does this happen in the movie?!
Colonel Sandurz: "Now". You're looking at "now", sir. Everything that happens now [indicates himself and Helmet] is happening "now". [Indicates the screen]
Dark Helmet: What happened to "then"?
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Call me when they can pour this Bacterial pudding into a bullet wound and have it heal up...that's the future I'm waiting for. Then I can finally start my crime-fighting vigilante spree.
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Re:Okay. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Okay. (Score:4, Informative)
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I dunno.. under that logic, I've seen a few folks for whom a bullet wound in the brain would be an upgrade....
Another problem is quacks. (Score:3, Informative)
The problem, with bullet wound is...[dirt].
Another problem with bullet wounds is emergency room doctors who believe the myth of "hydrostatic shock" damage and chop out a core of tissue around the bullet's path (as if it were a linear cancer), rather than treating it properly by cleaning and closing the wound (as if it were any other puncture-and-displacement trauma).
Yo, Docs! Even if the bullet somehow WAS traveling faster than the speed of sound in flesh (like about mach 4.4) shock waves aren't any big de
Re:Okay. (Score:5, Informative)
Right, and battery acid is really good at curing the common cold.
I dunno where you're getting this info, but no, bullets certainly do not "sterilize" anything. One of the leading causes of death historically has been infection. We're better at dealing with it today, but infections still occur on a regular basis:
"A gunshot is never sutured closed as the infection rate is very high. Bullets drag clothing into the wound and along the bullet track. Since clothing is of course not sterile, the wound is prone to infection if closed. Open wounds almost never get infected."
http://www.tacticalmedicalpacks.com/files/Combat_Tactics_Trauma_article.pdf [tacticalmedicalpacks.com]
"We have presented a series of 120 consecutive operative cases of penetrating wounds of the abdomen-72 gunshot wounds and 48 stab wounds. The majority of patients were in the 18 to 40 age group. The infection rate was 22% for gunshot wounds and 4.8% for knife wounds."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2609419/pdf/jnma00480-0069.pdf [nih.gov]
Re:Another problem is quacks. (Score:5, Funny)
Okay, we've fixed the holes in the concrete, and made holes in people. Seems to me the logical next step is to fill the holes in the people with concrete.
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Call me when they can pour this Bacterial pudding into a bullet wound and have it heal up...that's the future I'm waiting for. Then I can finally start my crime-fighting vigilante spree.
Or...you could put this pudding IN the bullet, then as soon as you'd got shot, you'd start healing. Joscelyn Elders would finally be vindicated!
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I think I would feel more comfortable with personally cloned human pudding in a bullet wound in my body than some foreign bacteria. mmm, human pudding...
Re:Okay. (Score:5, Informative)
An older article with considerably more detail. Not sure if it's the same bacteria.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19386-for-selfhealing-concrete-just-ad [newscientist.com]
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The only real problem I can see is in an environment like the SoCal desert, where the soil pH is extremely high, and also very high in calcium salts. Seems to me you'd have to do a test-run to make sure you didn't get a runaway effect in such soils, for applications where cracks in the concrete extend all the way through. Either that, or maybe precede the treatment with an acid wash. I'm sure some such control mechanism can be developed.
(When we tested the soil on my place, the pH was so high that the teste
Re:Okay. (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like a giant "Just So" story if you ask me.
Lots of pre-programed mutations working perfectly in the laboratory to seal cracks of a known nature.
Activated when the reach the bottom. Bottom? What if there is no bottom? Most cracks in concrete go right thru the slab.
React to the specific PH of the concrete? If only all concrete were the same. Its been in use for several hundred years, and the formula has been constantly evolving.
And nothing is said about the strength. If the concrete was broken by whatever means, what are the chances some bio glue could hold it together against the next insult?
Re:Okay. (Score:5, Informative)
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The Romans invented concrete.
That's only 1600-2200 or so years ago.
The Romans started using concrete before 200 B.C. [ucsb.edu], but Wikipedia says the Egyptian pyramids [wikimedia.org] were built with concrete long before that. So that makes its invention 2200-4600 years ago.
IMO "several hundred" was correct.
From your link: "being more than two but fewer than many". Considering civilization has only been around for ~60 centuries, "several" is arguably less than twenty. Try "many hundreds" next time you go for your pedantic medal. Thanks for playing.
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"decommoditization" of concrete? (Score:5, Insightful)
React to the specific PH of the concrete? If only all concrete were the same. Its been in use for several hundred years, and the formula has been constantly evolving.
Remember Monsanto and "roundup ready" seeds? Now imagine a "bio-healing ready" concrete... concrete that is differentiated by a specific compound formula which is standardized for a specific bacteria (of course several grades of the product combo will exist for both quality and usage differences ... which also allow for market segmentation)
All it will take is some enterprising megacorp with the legal muscle to patent this combo (and defend the patents) and you can effectively raised margin on concrete 10x at least.
Anything can be de-commoditized if it provides unique value and a big enough megacorp.
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All it will take is some enterprising megacorp with the legal muscle to patent this combo (and defend the patents) and you can effectively raised margin on concrete 10x at least.
Depends on whether they can get it into building codes or not. If they can't, then the concrete would comparable in cost (else you're not going to get it into the building).
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Maybe this isn't meant as a permanent repair? It would still be a hell of a boon if it worked fast enough that we could use it to temporarily shore up structures until they could be properly repaired.
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The material is a composite of proteins such as
and the same calcium carbonate crystals as the original concrete, so it's easily conceivable that the
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Okay, so there are many parameters to consider, should we give up because of that?
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Would you be happier if no one mentioned any of these "parameters"? Would that make successful development more likely? When questions are suppressed or not addressed during the early stages disasters [youtube.com] inevitably happen.
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Lord help us! This the gray goo!
Soon it will be fixing cracks we did not anticipate!
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Now, where're my sexy android catgirls?
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When does it stop? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:When does it stop? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA, it's not very long and explains just that fact you need; it does know when to stop.
Re:When does it stop? (Score:5, Funny)
"and they have a built-in self-destruct gene that prevents them from proliferating away from the concrete target."
That never works in the movies. One cosmic ray and the gene is replaced by another one that says," invade humans and turn them into statues."
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Re:When does it stop? (Score:4, Funny)
invade humans and turn them into statues
Living, moving statues with a ravenous, uncontrollable hunger for the brains of the unpetrified. Prepare yourself for 90 minutes of bad stoner jokes.
would you like grits with that? (Score:2)
Re:When does it stop? (Score:4, Funny)
They'll only be statues when you're looking at them.
Don't blink.
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One cosmic ray and the gene is replaced by another one that says," invade humans and turn them into statues."
Don't blink. Don't even blink.
Blink and you're dead.
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One cosmic ray and the gene is replaced by another one that says," invade humans and turn them into statues
Ssshhh, don't give people ideas. Remember, this is Slashdot [xarj.net]
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"invade humans and turn them into statues"
Ah, the Natalie Portman syndrome!
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The BacillaFilla spores start germinating only when they make contact with concrete — triggered by the very specific pH of the material — and they have a built-in self-destruct gene that prevents them from proliferating away from the concrete target.
I would like to buy some--the city is doing a <sarcasm> wonderful </sarcasm> job of taking care of the sidewalk in front of my house.
How do they know where 'the bottom' is? (Score:2)
Is the nanobot 'grey goo' earth going to be usurped by the bacteria concrete earth?
Re:How do they know where 'the bottom' is? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, since grey goo is such an abstract concept, they thought they would rather use something more concrete ...
Read teh article. (Score:3, Informative)
The spores germinate only in very alkaline environments — concrete has a quite high pH. The article is vague on details, but notes that "[the bacteria] have a built-in self-destruct gene that prevents them from proliferating away from the concrete target."
Now, What Could Possibly Go Wrong and all of that, but the bases are nominally covered.
Re:Read teh article. (Score:4, Funny)
The spores germinate only in very alkaline environments... ...but the bases are nominally covered.
I see what you did there.
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And the acids, I guess?
Rgds
Damon
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The spores germinate only in very alkaline environments...
So what's the limit? The well at my NV place has a pH of eight and the water at my townhouse a pH of nine. Will the city's water system and/or my residential well be plugged with bacterial pseudo-cement, strong as the real stuff? (Note that the well casing has a cement wall - just ideal for them to treat the boundary between it and the dirt as a crack and follow it down.)
Lots of alkaline soil out there (like around my townhouse). Before adding so
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Re:How do they know where 'the bottom' is? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How do they know where 'the bottom' is? (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolute worst case scenario is a grey goo outbreak being treated basically like a fire (which, when you think about it is the ultimate grey goo machine). There's a limit to how much energy is available for replication, and there's a limit on how efficient you can make your replication (at some level, the replicating nanobots will be literally tearing apart and putting back together materials). Fighting the grey goo only involves tearing about the replicators, not necessarily wasting energy putting the pieces back together into something useful.
In other words, it should be trivial to design a nanobot that tears apart the self-replicators but doesn't waste energy by making copies of itself. This nanobot would be manufactured a head of time and stored for future use, or manufactured in specialist facilities (even in a mobile truck if necessary) that provide the energy input necessary for their production. As long as your facilities have more energy available than the self-replicators do, you'll win out eventually. And the replicators will only have about as much energy available as a fire can produce.
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Call in sick (Score:4, Funny)
I can't come in today, my street has a bad cold.
Re:Call in sick (Score:5, Funny)
Lungs (Score:2)
And the bacteria knows the difference between concrete and lung tissue how?
Re:Lungs (Score:4, Informative)
What's the acidity of your lungs? Oh, I see. You didn't read the article. Carry on, then.
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The bacteria they made in the lab likes the acidity of concrete. What about the mutant bacteria that the bacteria in the crack makes?
It won't survive because it's still in the very alkaline concrete environment? Or as Morbo might put it: EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.
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Usually when you say that the bacteria 'likes' acidity it means that at least one of the proteins it depends on requires the acidity to function. If there are several proteins that are essential for the bacteria to live, the probability that all of the required mutations would occur becomes reasonably small. Additionally, even if the bacteria are able to mutate in such a way to live outside the concrete, they would be poorly adapted to that environment, and would most likely become food for something else.
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So the assumption, as I read it, is the environment in which the bacteria is deployed is assumed to have a consistent pH level to help it identify that it is in fact, concrete. However anything that also has that pH could potentially be a hospitiable environment.
Question: How are they planning on accounting for a non-lab environment where everything from moisture, temperature, hell even lighting apparently, can influence the pH of the target location? Based on respitory infection the pH in a lung is hardly
Re:Lungs (Score:4, Informative)
Also, the concrete repair activity is produced by upregulation of genes natural to Bacillus subtilis, not by anything transgenic. The upregulation of these genes presents an energy cost to the engineered bacterium while providing no benefit- if these bacteria mutate, it is more likely to be towards the wild phenotype. In addition, the team responsible has added a kill switch [igem.org] which tells the bacteria to commit suicide if sucrose is not present.
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I see, so when it escapes it's concrete prison, it'll infect and petrify only fatties like me who eat sweets, and the skinny hipsters who only drink cane-sugar sweetened soda?
And in exchange, get a really cool set of statuary?
Suh-weet.
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I dunno... I guess it depends if your tastes in statuary run to, oh, say the likes of this:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.gadling.com/media/2008/05/david.jpg [blogcdn.com]
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It's a good thing that no two items have the same pH. It's like a fingerprint! Hahahaha!!!
Re:Lungs (Score:5, Insightful)
One has an immune system, and the other looks like concrete.
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And the bacteria knows the difference between concrete and lung tissue how?
Well
I foresee a world... (Score:2)
... where bacteria-laden cast concrete garden gnomes evolve intelligence.
And it's not a pretty sight.
Mistaken article summary (Score:2)
Article summary states how it works incorrectly, which confused me.
"When the cells have been germinated, they burrow deep into the concrete until they reach the bottom."
should be
"When the cells have been germinated, they burrow deep into the concrete CRACKS until they reach the bottom"
Made me think at first it's going through the solid concrete which didn't sound like a good idea.
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Made me think at first it's going through the solid concrete which didn't sound like a good idea.
I'm not sure why it's a bad idea to strengthen the concrete where it isn't damaged, but I guess if your design depends on a certain amount of flex it could cause you problems.
I visited this story wondering if this could be tailored to improve concrete which was of generally poor quality because the mix was poor, which is burrowing through almost-solid concrete...
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Bone actually works like that, the osteoclasts eat the bone and their direction is controlled by electrical stimulation generated by stresses in the bone, which is followed by osteoblasts which build up the bone. This results in the bone being strongest in the direction that is most likely to be stressed.
It may be an unintended use... (Score:2)
Prior Art! (Score:2)
More Info From iGEM (Score:5, Informative)
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Sucrose?
Oh I see! This is nothing more than a system to convert fast food into concrete. Repair the sidewalk and cure the obesity epidemic in one fell swoop.
Re:More Info From iGEM (Score:4, Funny)
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Ah, thanks, that answers my question above -- the soil where I live is so alkaline that it's comparable to concrete. I was wondering how you'd avoid a runaway in that situation, but adding the sucrose-based nutrient-limiter routine seems to solve it well enough -- alkaline soils typically are pretty much nutrient-free.
Why use bacteria? Just insert glue directly! (Score:2)
Re:Why use bacteria? Just insert glue directly! (Score:4, Informative)
If you've ever tried to pump glue into a crack in concrete, you'll quickly figure that out. It's somewhere between messy and inadequate as a repair method, and certainly doesn't get into the smaller cracks, let alone the microcracks. The idea here is to have the glue self-extend, filling the air pockets and microcracks that no glue with sufficient surface tension to stick could ever manage.
However I think where this will become a more useful technique is for fixing the kinds of surface cracks that ail structures exposed to repeated wet/freeze/thaw cycles -- the typical winter climate for the east slope of the Rocky Mountains. Mount Rushmore would seem to be a good candidate, since seasonal surface cracking is what's causing damage.
Concrete roads that suffer similar winter freeze/thaw damage could also benefit -- instead of trying to patch the road one crack at a time (usually an exercise in futility, culminating in yawning potholes), or having to dig up and replace the concrete (an extremely expensive job), just wash it with a slurry of this bacteria. That could even eliminate most of the seasonal damage, by filling the microcracks that are where freeze damage starts.
Imagine if your state and local highway departments could reduce their budgets by simply needing to do less repair on concrete-based roads. Even if you don't believe in reducing taxes when need is reduced, it would free up that budget to use elsewhere.
This was predicted a long time ago! (Score:2)
This can only go terribly wrong.
Calcium Carbonate? (Score:2)
I suspect the Brits are also working on having this technology used as non-conductive fillings.
Questionable (Score:2)
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Re:Gigacrete looks better (Score:4, Insightful)
They said the binder was 100% non-toxic. which is only a small percentage of the product (as filler is the rest, up to 80%).
To see another example of "green" being a fib, look up AggRite construction/pavement aggregate.
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I had the same thought... wouldn't bottom ash be essentially "distillate of everything toxic left behind by the burn process"...??
As to the other fillers... what makes concrete strong isn't just the binder, it's also (perhaps mostly) the character of the filler. Organics decompose over time. Now what.. you've got binder and decomposition products, but no filler. Explain to me how that retains its structural strength and integrity? Not only that, but with varied fillers, how do you achieve predictable struct
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That's where I got the AggRite reference from. =) I'm a first-year law student, and I'm from Pennsylvania.
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Well then! See what an excellent job you did of making me look up the reference! :)
No doubt we'll see more of this in the future, as more 'green' companies increasingly get subsidized into business and put forth similarly questionable products.
Re:Gigacrete looks better (Score:4, Insightful)
Gigacrete [treehugger.com] looks like a better material for building in my opinion. I'll just have bacteria in my yogurt for now.
Nice GigaCrete advert but the bacteria isn't presented as a replacement for concrete or GigaCrete. It's presented as a mechanism to repair existing concrete.
Or are you advocating we raze all existing concrete buildings and tear up all sidewalks?
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Re:Gigacrete looks better (Score:4, Informative)
So basically, it had nothing at all do with the topic hand and your comparison "I'll just have bacteria in my yogurt for now" was completely meaningless since no one has suggested building new things with it since that wouldn't work anyway.
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If only there was a little underlined bit of text in TFS that brings you to a short, one-page article. You could read it, and could even look like you know what you're talking about!
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That depends. How many highly alkali environments are there in nature? (Answer: Very few)
Solids do not have pH. You can't have a pH without a solvent. The alkali environment present in concrete does not exist within humans...or any animal or plant I'm aware of.
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Well, if you read TFA, its apparent that the bacteria need a strong alkali environment, such as in concrete. Strong alkali environments are rare in nature.
Ok, we're not even going to consider this little bit of fantasy until you come up with a remotely plausible way that this could happen.
In little test tubes from the people who invented it.
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How would you know? You didn't even read the damn thing, as is apparent from your questions, some of which are addressed in the damn article in the first place.
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