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Beer and Bacteria to be used in Toxin Cleanup
GospelHead821 writes "According to this article in Popular Science, a chemistry student at the University of Tulsa is driving research into use of toxin-munching "sulfate-reducing bacteria" (SRBs) to help cleanup toxic, solid effluent from abandoned zinc and lead mines near her home. Where does the beer come in? Apparently, it has proved an excellent food source for the bacteria and helps to extend the lifespan of the normally short-lived SRBs by several months. Currently, the procedure is in the testing phase, with models being employed to simulate the conditions that would be present in a large-scale detoxification plant, which in turn, is based on the natural wetlands from which these bacteria hail."
Are you telling me these bacteria are getting free beer?
Goddamnit that's just not right.
Sounds like the Spirit cooled computers from a few years back!
:)
Alcohol sure does work wonders
If I remember correctly, they did a kind of similar thing when the Exxon Valdez oil ship crashed... I think there was some bacteria that had been engineered to live off oil, and so they dropped some bacteria on the oil and that cleaned up much of it. This is from my freshman biology class, so I'm not quite sure if it's accurate.
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Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
Somebody finally found a fitting use for Budweiser, Coors, Miller, et al!
I'm sure those little SRBs will go better and be less hung over if they're given some decent beer instead of some swill like Miluakee's Beast.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
And it runs on beer? You'll also have to build a second detox facility for the workers...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
will this technology be free as in speech, or free as in beer?
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
Dr. Kolynsqwerky: What is this bottle of beer doing here?
Student: It's... hmmm... an excellent food source for the bacteria and helps to extend the lifespan of the normally short-lived SRBs by several months, Dr.!
This space left intentionally blank.
Researcher A: "How do we clean up this toxic waste..."
Researcher B: "My group has had successful studies using this bacteria. The only problem is that it dies out too quickly."
Researcher A: "Well, how do we keep it alive long enough to do any good..."
Researcher Delta: "BREWSKIS!!!!!!!! WOOOOO HOOOO!"
This sounds familiar...
old article:
night_flyer writes: "Stale Beer may be used to clean up one of the worst superfund sites in the U.S. ... Now the question is, who leaves beer in the fridge long enough to go stale?" The site in question is a former zinc mine in Oklahoma which is full of toxic leavings, and has been on the EPA's Superfund hotlist for a few decades. A University of Tulsa professor named Tom Harris, who originally considered mollasses, is quoted as saying that "a wetlands treated with beer would be more effective in removing zinc and lead from runoff water than an untreated wetlands."
It's the same guy, the same research, but just a different application!
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
You know, this gives a whole new meaning to "microbrew".
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
. Funding. Nice. First Pot helps with glaucoma, then beer is good for the environment. What's next, qualudes to beef up your firewall?
You are not the customer.
Beer from cans? Urgh!
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Get em drunk and set them loose. Poor little things. They are going to have a hell of a hangover when they are finished with all that dirty work.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
it has proved an excellent food source ... and helps to extend the lifespan...
Mmmm.... beer.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Intoxicated bacteria help remove toxins!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Some use (and justification!) for all those homebrew experiments that somehow ended tasting like ********
In Murphy We Turst
This isn't original, save feeding the bugs with beer.
We used Desulfovibrio desulfuricans to treat water in the Everglades with high mercury levels.
Modified Pseudomonas aeruginosa have been used for years to clean up oil spills from the hard to get places. Like in between rocks and underneath sand.
Microbes: they're not just for diseases anymore.
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Reuters -- Kemps announced today that it will be adding Yo-Beer to it's line of Yo-J branded drinks. The state of Oklahoma has agreed to purchase 76 million gallons of Yo-Beer to help clean up the state. Kemps stock has risen 23% on the news. However, the Oklahoma state legislature withdrew their offer after realizing that their entire trailer park population is basically walking bags of beer and bacteria, and they are already paying millions of dollars to keep them around in the form of welfare and unemployment checks. Kemps stock fell to 10% below market open.
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Stale Beer to Clean Up Contamination?
Posted by timothy on Monday July 30, @12:23PM
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I hear some posters expressing concern that bacteria is getting all this free beer. As far as I'm concerned - better the bacteria than me. Let me explain...
Look at it this way - it's not all bad. I'm sure they'll be using cheap American domestic beer (yuck! yellow water!).
At least they won't be using imported Canadian, Mexican, or (mmm!) German, etc beers. Now THAT would be tragic!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
I sure hope they're being careful.
While this bioremediation technology looks real cool at first glance, and creates lots of beer jokes, I can see one potential flaw with it, unless I'm missing something. The flaw is that all that toxic lead and zinc have to go somewhere, even if the bacteria chew it up and remediate the soil. So where are the heavy metals going?
My guess is that they are taken up by the bacteria and somehow locked into a protein structure, putting the metal in the bacteria cell and not in the ground. Okay fine, you've gotten the toxic metal out of the ground and into the bacteria, but now what? If the bacteria are just left in the soil, they'll eventually decay and rather than having large chunks of zinc and lead laying around, you'll have atomisically dispersed metal all over the place.
I wish the popular science article had been more specific or verbose in how the whole thing would be engineered. My guess is that they'll have to somehow separate the soil from the bacterial colonies and burn the colony to collect the pure metal. The metal can then be recycled or stored safely. Separating the soil from the bacteria though is going to be very difficult.
I remember a similar technology that used plants to remove mercury from contaminated water streams rather than using bacteria. The scientists took a swamp plant that naturally had an affinity for mercury ions, and selectively bred/genetically engineered the plants to have even more affinity for the toxic mercury ions. The plants roots when then dangle in the waste streams, removing the ions and moving it to the leaves (natural defense mechanism as it turns out - animals and some bugs don't want to eat mercury-toxic leaves). After awhile the plants could be "harvested" and burned, where the mercury metal could then be collected, distilled, and recycled.
Given the sucess of the above approach (its now used by several companies that sometimes have mercury metal in their chemical waste streams) I'm surprised that a similar approach isn't used here.
If any of you out there know how this whole process works, or where these metals are going, please let me know via this forum, I'm very interested in finding out.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
That alone deserves a Nobel prize, for
well, something..
Think about it, instead of having to pay to dispose of failed batches of beer or raw materials that didn't quite pass QC, the brewing companies can sell their waste and minimize or even mitigate their losses. This reminds me of how in the early days of the steel industry, the byproduct of steel production, ethylene glycol, was often dumped in local rivers. Once the usefull properties of this substance were revealed, a former waste product became a valuable commodity. Maybe one day this kind of recycling will be the norm rather than the exception. But for now, citizens of industrialized countries, and especially America, seem content to throw away wealth in the form of unrealized potential of used goods and byproducts, or outright burn it by spewing it out the exhaust of grossly inefficient SUVs. We have a long way to go towards a sustainable, green economy that delivers on the promises of modern living, but these new innovations in recycling and pollution cleanup are a step in the right direction.
leetle tiny dead homiez.
Do a google search before posting.
... An appropriate use for American beer.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Finally, someone has found a use for American beer :-)