Slashdot Mirror
Bio-Weapons That Eat Ammunition and Fuel
1gor writes: "This article in The Observer mentions Pentagon's plans to use genetically modified bugs that 'eat' the enemy's fuel and ammunition supplies without harming humans (they also want to to pacify the enemy by spraying Valium). Imagine an escaped virus destroying the Earth's oil reserves and its whole industrial potential? Curiously, the military may implement the environmentalists' ultimate dream!"
Clearly oil serves a great many needs, fueling your car being just one of those needs. To claim without basis that a group of people dream of the worlds oil stocks becoming unusable is to reveal your own bias against this group.
Ahh, my favourite rhetorical recipe, the tautological soffle.
Imagine an escaped virus destroying the Earth's oil reserves and its whole industrial potential? Curiously, the military may implement the environmentalists' ultimate dream!
Let me clue you in on what it is that the fuel eaten by these bacteria (not viruses) eventually breaks down into - water and carbon dioxide. This is a more controlled form of a process better known as FIRE.
Flame of yet another kind: Timothy, you are an idiot. Even as a joke that was a grade A stupid thing to say. It reflects poorly on you as an editor and as a human being. If you don't know the difference between a virus and a bacterium shut your cornhole.
We, Environmentalists, object to gasoline being burned (turned into Carbon Dioxide) faster than it is deposited in peat marshes and such. I don't want to rehash the global warming argument here, so don't y'all even start.
The fact that the gasoline, while burned, does useful work, instead of, say, fueling the growth of a manmade organism, does not bother anyone.
You can find out more about Hydrocarbon Utilizing Microbes (HUMs) here. The document is fully accessible to a non-scientist. The people at Brooks Air Force base, who are/would be (?) developing these fuel eating microbes for offensive use have already made use of them in a peaceful context. Again, the press release is non technical. Personally, I find this to be admirable work - they're using them to clean up petrochemical contamination of soil and groundwater, which is an underappreciated ecological problem. I'm not terribly worried about these organisms going out of control and eating the world's petrochemical reserves. They exist in nature already in various forms and have not done that.
The New Scientist has an older article about the fuel eating bugs, or, more specifically, about the circumstances surrounding the release of documents discussing the bugs; I think this may have come up on slashdot before but I searched just now and didn't find it. The sunshine project also has an article about there efforts to get the documents released.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.