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Bacteria in our Drinking Water
nachoworld writes "Normally we don't like bacteria in our water, but it seems this breakthru will allow us to use sulfate-reducing bacteria to clean up our water. Talk about "bugs" in our soup (ok, ok, I know that viruses are the bugs, bacterias are not, but I couldn't think of another joke)."
After the bacteria clumps all the unwanted materials, how do you get them out?
Have you read my journal today?
Don't worry, the FDA will probably require it to be listed as a food aditive. A few years ago someone bred a strain of bugs that would eat all the worms and other pests that would try to invade and eat corn(maize for non amiercans) in silos. Even though the bugs and their remains could not be found in the corn they had been in, the FDA said it had to be listed as a food additive. Why is this interesting? Because if you hose down your crop with chemical pesticides, which are found in abundant amounts in the food even when we eat it, the FDA does not require it being listed as a food aditive.
Basically, the FDA or some other goverment agency will find a way to make using any wonderfull and great new processies illigal, while keeping wastefull, dangerous and enviornmentally hostile processies standard and perfectly legal.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
that consume the sulfur and zinc an produce something useful, like alcohol. Where can I get me some of those? Or maybe, we can get them to produce really cheap crack, and offer it to the /. moderators!
Mod me down. Please. I hit karma cap and I don't care.
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I think there will be some problems implementing this as a water treatment for incoming water. It's more likely to be used in the treatment of waste water.
IFAIR sulphate reducing bacteria live in oxygen poor environments (which is why they reduce sulphate rather than using oxygen), and a common by-product is poisonous hydrogen sulphide. This isn't too pleasant in your drinking water, but is less of a problem when treating waste water.
Another thing I was wondering is the relative stability of the bacteria in a mutational sense. Probably an unfounded concern, but it never pays to look into these things before hand. Then again if you implemented a chemical treatment after the bacteria treatment I guess it wouldn't matter.
Pretty neat solution, now we just need to find a bacteria that can eat all our trash, clean our air, decrease greenhouse emissions and restore the ozone layer.
UBU
Consider this:
Find a heavy-metals rich undercurrent in the ocean, pump into tanks, run through bacteria farm, release back to sea. Use bacteria as ore for slightly modified conventional refining process.
Granted, you couldn't extract gold this way, as most of its existence in seawater is in the form of chloride, but there are a number of metals (silver, lead, uranium, thorium come to mind) that would be amenable.
Alternatively, locate sulphate-based ore bodies by ecologically benign means, drill holes into same, explosive fragment, and then pump bacteria-laden soup down hole and back out for extraction. I'll take a few well housings hidden in the trees over a strip-mine any day.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
"...viruses are the bugs, bacterias are not, but I couldn't think of another joke)."
Bacterium - singular Bacteria - plural
Next disk crash please don't ask "Where did all my datas go?"
That's an interesting idea. The first question I have though is do such heavy metal currents exist in the first place? I'm just curious what kind of mechanism would cause such a thing. Exposure of an ore rich deposit to water? It's seems to me that normal diffusion would probably be high enough that the concentration of said metals wouldn't be significantly higher than in normal sea water, but that's just little more than a guess.
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Even without such a current, though, the metals content of seawater, plus its availability and ease of handling have had engineers trying to work out extraction methods for some time.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
i thought that some bacteria was a good thing?