Some Clever Farmers are Harvesting Metals From Plants (nytimes.com) 94
The New York Times reports:
Some of Earth's plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms -- about 700 are known -- flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die....
The plants not only collect the soil's minerals into their bodies but seem to hoard them to "ridiculous" levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne who has researched the relationship between plants and their soils since the 1970s. This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants...?
On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, Dr. Baker and an international team of colleagues have proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets. Now, as the team scales up to the world's largest trial at nearly 50 acres, their target audience is industry. In a decade, the researchers hope that a sizable portion of insatiable consumer demand for base metals and rare minerals could be filled by the same kind of farming that produces the world's coconuts and coffee... [T]he technology has the additional value of enabling areas with toxic soils to be made productive...
Now, after decades behind the lock and key of patents, Dr. Baker said, "the brakes are off the system."
Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 adds "This process, called phytomining, cannot supplant the scale of traditional mining, but could make a dent in the world's demand for nickel, cobalt, and zinc.
"Small-holding farmers could earn more from phytomining than from coaxing food crops from metal-laden soils. Using these plants could also help clean brownfields left over from prior industrial use."
The plants not only collect the soil's minerals into their bodies but seem to hoard them to "ridiculous" levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne who has researched the relationship between plants and their soils since the 1970s. This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants...?
On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, Dr. Baker and an international team of colleagues have proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets. Now, as the team scales up to the world's largest trial at nearly 50 acres, their target audience is industry. In a decade, the researchers hope that a sizable portion of insatiable consumer demand for base metals and rare minerals could be filled by the same kind of farming that produces the world's coconuts and coffee... [T]he technology has the additional value of enabling areas with toxic soils to be made productive...
Now, after decades behind the lock and key of patents, Dr. Baker said, "the brakes are off the system."
Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 adds "This process, called phytomining, cannot supplant the scale of traditional mining, but could make a dent in the world's demand for nickel, cobalt, and zinc.
"Small-holding farmers could earn more from phytomining than from coaxing food crops from metal-laden soils. Using these plants could also help clean brownfields left over from prior industrial use."
Re:Diverting arable lands away from food productio (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously didn't read the article. The process is especially suited to contaminated soils.
After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops.
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You obviously didn't read the article. The process is especially suited to contaminated soils.
I didn't read the article either. It's paywalled. But with some genetic tinkering to bioconcentrate a greater range of specific metals, this could be a way of leaching specific contaminants out of agricultural soils, such as the cesium around Fukushima.
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Re:Diverting arable lands away from food productio (Score:4, Insightful)
Sound like another way to divert agricultural lands away from food production.
Unless, of course, these lands couldn't be used for food production anyway, for one reason or another. But I doubt it.
I see it as a possible mitigation of the mess sometimes left at mine sites, rather than a profit center - though if there is a profit, that would be good.
As far as nickel goes, the mining and processing of some older sites leaves one hella bad toxic mess behind. Reclaiming and restoring might jut be a great thing.
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The next step is to develop GMO crops that are even better at concentrating metals.
Perhaps this can be combined with biomass production. The crop could be harvested and burned to produce electricity or converted to syngas, and then the metal can be extracted from the ashes.
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The next step is to develop GMO crops that are even better at concentrating metals.
Perhaps this can be combined with biomass production. The crop could be harvested and burned to produce electricity or converted to syngas, and then the metal can be extracted from the ashes.
Switchgrass might just be the ticket for that sort of thing.
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Re:Diverting arable lands away from food productio (Score:4, Interesting)
Sound like another way to divert agricultural lands away from food production.
Unless, of course, these lands couldn't be used for food production anyway, for one reason or another. But I doubt it.
Well they say it can make non productive land useful by removing toxic levels of trace minerals, which is good. Conversely if overused it likely also has the potential to remove important trace minerals from the soil eventually limiting what else will grow there without supplements.
In any case it will require the soil condition to be carefully monitored and future crops to be carefully selected going forward. This is not your grandfather's crop rotation anymore.
Re:Diverting arable lands away from food productio (Score:5, Interesting)
Or another way to say it, once the metal is gone, it isn't coming back. So land turned to metal farming will have to be turned back to normal food production, or literally anything but a metal farm.
Cynicism plus ignorance is a third of dashslot. Would be nice to get rid of that.
Re:Diverting arable lands away from food productio (Score:4, Funny)
land turned to metal farming will have to be turned back to normal food production
Oh no...from a metal farm to a bubblegum pop farm...
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Sound like another way to divert agricultural lands away from food production.
Good. The world is suffering from agricultural surpluses. Low prices for agricultural commodities are a major cause of 3rd world poverty. Even in developed countries, commodity prices are so low that farmers need subsidies to stay in business.
We can raise farm incomes, reduce taxpayer-funded subsidies, and get a clean reliable source of strategic metals. Win, win, win.
Re:Diverting arable lands away from food productio (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet people are starving in the world.
They are starving because of war and corruption, not because of food shortages.
Cheap food makes hunger worse. If poor farmers can't make enough money from selling their crops, they grow only enough food for their own family. Then when a drought or war comes, they have no surplus or savings to fall back on.
We suffer more from not distributing our agricultural surpluses equitably.
The best way to do that is to end subsidies and overproduction. Food should be traded in competitive free markets and farmers should have clear property rights to their land and harvest. Every country with endemic hunger fails to do that.
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>> The best way to do that is to end subsidies and overproduction. Food should be traded in competitive free markets and farmers should have clear property rights to their land and harvest. Every country with endemic hunger fails to do that.
this has been proven true at least 1 time in the food aspect. In 1920 russia was having a food shortage and Lenin concluded that small private business might or should work. SO he let that happened and shortly thereafter ( 2 years ) it was alleviated.
Never underest
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Undifferentiated goods always end up selling at the lowest price in free markets, regardless of your costs. If you have a tonne of wheat to sell and your farm costs you more to run than the one next to you through no fault of your own, you're probably screwed. Food production is hard in the modern context; the scale of the market means your wheat isn't special, and so you have no pricing control. The somewhat inevitable conclusion is huge factory farms that can amortize the cost of good and bad plots of lan
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Undifferentiated goods always end up selling at the lowest price in free markets
Nope. If it costs $5 to grow a bushel of wheat, then in a free market, wheat will cost about $5 per bushel.
But if the government pays farmers $2 in subsidies for each bushel, the price of wheat will be about $3 per bushel.
This will lead to overproduction, so one solution is to dump the surplus onto foreign markets, driving poor farmers out of business, resulting in poverty and hunger.
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Still, cheaper food clearly isn't the solution. One real problem is that international trade opens subsistence farmers up to competition with agri-business, and drives them off the land. That nation is now more reliant on imported food, and there are less local jobs. Food may be cheaper, but now you also have high unemployment since it's all produced and packaged overseas, and just imported, so people end up more hungry as a result of cheap food imports. Note here, that the problem isn't *international* dis
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One real problem is that international trade opens subsistence farmers up to competition with agri-business, and drives them off the land.
This is a serious problem because the agri-businesses are receiving subsidies from 1st world taxpayers to sell at below-market prices.
If we stopped the subsidies, the 3rd world farmers would be able to compete, and hunger would be diminished.
To help solve this problem, here is a complete list of the 2020 presidential candidates who had the moral courage to go to Iowa and announce they would end our current inefficient and counterproductive system of agricultural subsidies: { }
Re:Diverting arable lands away from food productio (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Diverting arable lands away from food producti (Score:2)
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https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]
Soil rehabilitation is a good thing. Now all we need are plants to pull coal tar, lead, toluene, and some other fun crap out of the soil.
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Re:It is not just "the plants" that accomplish thi (Score:5, Informative)
I farm for a living and I am also excited about research being done into finding microbes that work with traditional non fixing crops. Staples like wheat. And you're right. Working with nature to be productive is the way forward. Nearly every farmer I talk to today wants to do things to build soil health. I don't love synthetic fertilizers. I worry a lot about fungicides and insecticides, especially fungicides effect on soil microbes. Healthier soils mean there are less weeds, less disease, and so less pesticides required. In some ways it's a time if great fear with climate change, but it's also a time of exciting (re) Discovery. Quite a few guys are experimenting with be intercropping to get more diversity and a more natural way of growing There is a roll to play in this by the big ag companies. They aren't just trying to wreck the planet for money's sake. They recognize that if we fail as farmers they lose their business.
Anyway using plants to concentrate otherwise toxic metals is awesome! I don't think this will be used to displace food production. But maybe in rotation with food production to improve soil health and promote more diversity. Certainly to clean up damaged ecosystems.
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Healthier soils mean there are less weeds
Why would healthier soils have fewer weeds?
Re:It is not just "the plants" that accomplish thi (Score:5, Informative)
Weeds are typically "pioneer species." They proliferate where soil conditions are too poor to support more normal crops. Solve the soil problems and weeds no longer hold a survival advantage over the other crops. Thus, "fewer" weeds with respect to the plants you wanted to grow.
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That makes sense, I was wondering about that. It makes sense that if you're growing tomatoes and the soil is perfect for tomatoes, it will be less perfect for anything else, and thus the tomatoes will out-compete whatever you consider weeds in that context.
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Re:It is not just "the plants" that accomplish thi (Score:4, Insightful)
You're not wrong. But it's super easy for you to say that when you're not the one doing it. I agree that monoculture has reached it's limits. That's why I said people are experimenting with different techniques like intercropping, while still being feasible to actually do. Simply saying "stop monoculture farming" is a bit presumptuous on your part.
There are a lot of great young farmers on youtube these days sharing what they do. It would be helpful if more people watched them to get an idea of what farming is really like and why it has been the way it was and where it's going. Plus to appreciate the work they do and the reasons they do it.
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I think it would require the big business farms in the mid-west get broken up. They also have their tentacles into Washington with that ethanol subsidy and their corn fields. And the farm vote has a larger punch in those states which skews the government. The orange pasty's tariffs which cause the Chinese to back off American grain now cost the American taxpayers more in subsidies than Obama's saving the auto and banking industries.
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In his perspective and his defense, He's right, you just can't stop doing monoculture farming without it having a brutal effect in the entire supply chain.
best example is corn, when oil went north of 110, it became real profitable to turn it into ethanol. and then mexico ( where it represents a huge part of the nations dietary needs or wants ) started getting hungry.
It's a slow change road.
Most farmer's I know are just starting to learn how to increase carbon load in dirt they plow naturally. If you walk a
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I call it dirt, I know you can call it soil.
If you got dirt in your blood, then it's dirt,
if you got soil in your blood then it's soil.
if you got shit for brains, then you are screwed LOL
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Huh? You said "Monocropping is dead, friend". What the other guy said was just paraphrasing that. The meaning is identical.
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If you're making a sob story here about being misquoted and now telling people to kill themselves then you're just a troll.
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Trump's tariffs have screwed the farmers so bad he's spending more to bail them out than was spent on bailing out the banks and the auto dealers. And the American people get to pay for these subsidies.
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Which has the obvious corollary that we'll need to trim the human population by a billion or several (which is something we've known since the 1970s). My personal estimate has been (for the last couple of decades) that we need to decrease by 2 to 4 Gdeath.
Coronavirus is probably not in that league.
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Re:Cost of a US Nickel (Score:4, Informative)
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So, what's the cost to produce a nickel from nickel? If it's over five cents. Then just melt coin.
Note: it's illegal for *Americans* to deface US currency.
Only if you put the defaced money back into circulation. The law was originally about shaving precious metal from coins.
Re:Cost of a US Nickel (Score:5, Informative)
You are allowed to do it for "educational, amusement, novelty, jewelry, and similar purposes as long as the volumes treated and the nature of the treatment makes it clear that such treatment is not intended as a means by which to profit solely from the value of the metal content of the coins. " Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Title 31, Subtitle B, Chapter 1, Part 82, Section 82.2
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Be warned: nickels are mostly copper. Standard us nickel composition is 75% copper, 25% nickel. Quite an odd amalgam: it cancels the color of copper in the coin.
We should be worried about these farmers (Score:5, Funny)
From TFA:
fter a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets.
Along with environmental concerns of these plants taking over, it seems that it also makes farmers rich and gives them the strength of the Hulk.
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That is, if you want to put a solar farm there and have the capital to invest in it. Growing crops has a much lower investment.
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50 acres of land to make thousands of dollars a year isn't a lot of money.
50 acres of land generating a few thousand dollars by extracting metals from the soil, or 50 acres of land generating zero dollars because of metals in the soil.
Tough choice.
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You mixed that up. 50 acres is the next plan trial phase. There was nowhere in that that they said the 50 acres was what produced the 500 pounds of nickel citrate.
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Little known fact (Score:2)
Wow... (Score:3)
Them do be some mighty strong farmers!
See why patents/copyrights are bad? (Score:1)
This tech couldn't hit the market until the patents expired.
It's not plants, but . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
In his 1976 book Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke wrote about a "Golden Reef", in which the corals had been genetically modified to filter gold from sea water.
Re:It's not plants, but . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
But after 1988 they discovered that the gold content of sea water was about 1000 times lower than previously reported [sciencedirect.com]. There is so little gold in seawater that gold in electrical contacts (for example) in the laboratory probably contaminated it at levels far above the real value. At 50 femtomoles per liter there is only about 14,000 tonnes of gold in the entire ocean. There is about 190,000 tonnes of mined gold in existence so all the gold in all the world's oceans would increase this stockpile by about 7%. Now uranium on the other hand looks like a viable process.
Re:It's not plants, but . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Now uranium on the other hand looks like a viable process.
A plant that thrives on uranium. I can just see it now: "Feed me, Seymour!"
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Finally! A lasting food source for CowboyNeal!
Fast harder better (Score:2)
Platinum, palladium, rhodium (Score:2)
Plant alongside roads. Some sort of grass would be ideal. Mow periodically and refine.
I lost my link, but there is a video made by a guy who swept a few hundred yards of freeway shoulder, smelted it and got a few beads of platinum. IIRC, the yield of platinum from sweepings exceeded that of some mines.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
So... (Score:2)
So contrary to what my Dad said, money *does* grow on trees...
"What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants."
How could this work (Score:2)
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Oh, man, bummer. Now we have to invent plants that don't eat metal to grow there.
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Yes, and then that land would be better-suited to other crops as a result of the lower metal content. So this is good for farmers who are current trying to eke out crops in marginal land due to metal contamination. Switch to metal then they can grow other crops again later.
Radionuclide recovery (Score:2)
I wonder if a plant could be selected to absorb radionuclide contamination from places like Fukushima and Chernobyl? Say for example a plant that has an affinity for strontium-90 which, IIRC, decays to either cadmium or nickel.
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No. You could, however, remove ALL strontium. The extra neutron isn't going to be noticeable to the plant that concentrates strontium....
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Theoretically you might be able to make an organism that concentrates strontium-90. There's evidence of biological isotopic fractionation (this one is U235: https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com])
Don't know why you'd want to for strontium. Just pull it all out. Separating U235 and 238 has more practical applications.
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Don't know why you'd want to for strontium. Just pull it all out.
To handle the waste water at Fukushima.
There's evidence of biological isotopic fractionation (this one is U235: https://www.nature.com/article [nature.com]... [nature.com])
Thank you very much for that link, that's great news I hope it can be developed into an industrial useful way to extract those radionuclides from the environment. I don't know if the same organism could pull out sr90 and U235 at the same time, however cleaning up mine tailing with algae would be big step forward. Maybe one day it could handle plutonium.
Separating U235 and 238 has more practical applications.
Indeed, a biological enrichment process that would effectively be solar powered - what an irony that would be.
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Why would you want to pull a *particular isotope* of strontium out of the water? There's no reason to leave stable strontium in the water (not that there would be much to start with) so just take it all out. That process will be much more efficient and easier to engineer than trying to fiddle with preferentially extracting specific isotopes.
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Why would you want to pull a *particular isotope* of strontium out of the water? There's no reason to leave stable strontium in the water (not that there would be much to start with) so just take it all out. That process will be much more efficient and easier to engineer than trying to fiddle with preferentially extracting specific isotopes.
sr90 was the motivation however taking it all out would be just as good - thanks!
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They're asking about the difference between targeting Strontium in general, vs Strontium-90 *specifically*. A strontium collecting plant is sufficient, it doesn't need to be specific about the type of strontium.
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They're asking about the difference between targeting Strontium in general, vs Strontium-90 *specifically*. A strontium collecting plant is sufficient, it doesn't need to be specific about the type of strontium.
Thanks for clearing that up, I was focused on the goal as I'm interested in things that could be used to clean up nuclear accidents. However a technique that could be engineered to different types of effluent heavy metals at different industrial sites would be a massive win for dealing with post-industrial activity and accidents.
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In principle, sure, but the specific chemistry matters. Strontium mimics calcium, which sits just above it in column 2 of the Periodic Table. So deplete the strontium in the soil this way you're going to have to deplete the calcium too. I think you'd run out of other trace elements the plant needs long before you do that.
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That's a point, and a good one, since it plays into why Strontium-90 is seen as bad in the first place. It gets uptaken in place of calcium, so you end up with radioactive stuff in your bones/teeth. But for cleaning up strontium contaminated land, a calcium-absorbing plant might be the choice. It may also picking up strontium, so you can clean that up, then you're only dealing with calcium-deficient soil, which is a much more minor problem.
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Brazil nut trees do.
They accumulate Radium in the nutshells; the Radium content is about a thousand times that of typical plant parts.
Question (Score:3)
I'm not at all knowledgeable about farming, so if somebody is better informed, please enlighten me
If I understand correctly, plants would only be able to extract and concentrate metal they can reach with their roots - so say a couple of meters down from the surface. At the typical concentrations, that won't be a lot - and, unless there is some mechanism that renews the metal in the superficial layers, it would be exhausted in a few years. I can see bio-concentration work in the sea, where the water is continuously renewed. But I don't know any processes that will refresh the metal contents of the ground.
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
You're right. But if assay shows the soil is high in X recoverable mineral, 'mine' it out and then rotate in new dirt into the soil. The key point is that smelting and other recovery mechanisms are energy intensive and often have a threshold below which they're not economically viable, but if a plant accumulates X, that is a different economic equation.
Last of all, imagine using this concept & finding plants that recover rare earths from landfills, reduce harmful metals in contaminated topsoil, etc.
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That happens with regular mining, too. It eventually runs out.
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That's not really the point. It's not a completely renewable source. This just allows contaminated land to have productive value, and the end result is it's cleaned up for other purposes.
But also, all that stuff we use goes somewhere, back into the ground at some point. So you could something like this on landfill sites perhaps, too. Elements aren't actually *consumed* after all, unless it's in a reactor.
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Tiberium Dawn (Score:2)
Fix your teeth! (Score:1)
This would save on dental costs!