New Research to Find Environment-Cleansing Bugs

Hop-Frog writes: "Here is a report on work going toward engineering bugs to cleanse the environment. There are bugs to eat carbon, toxic waste and more. This should please many people of a variety of political persuations."

Comments

Can't please all the people all of the time

[undeg chwech]

This should please many people of a variety of political persuations

Yeah ... it will please everyone who doesn't mind genetically engineered super-bacteria roaming the planet.

Re:Can't please all the people all of the time

[silicon_synapse]

Yeah ... it will please everyone who doesn't mind genetically engineered super-bacteria roaming the planet.

It's no big deal. If they get out of hand we can release genetically engineered rodents to eat them. And if they get out of control we'll release genetically engineered cats to eat them...

Re:Can't please all the people all of the time

[Croatian Sensation]

Actually,

most of the "bugs" used in these projects have nothing to do with genetic engineering or some sort of weird "superbugs". The company that I work for, along with many others work on isolating bugs that are able to use certain "contaminants" as food sources.

They do so by making the environment that they live in more hospitable to them by changing factors such as pH, dissolved oxygen and the presence of nutrients.

There's nothing new about this, guys. And it's only scary if you don't take the time to read up on it. What IS scary is some of the crap that's in people's drinking water right now.

Re:Can't please all the people all of the time

[b_pretender]

This should please many people of a variety of political persuations

If they create the bugs to be gay/transgendered in nature, then they will please even more persuations.

Re:Can't please all the people all of the time

[junk95]

First of all, the article mentions explicitely "genetically engineered bugs".

Now, when you go around engineering bugs, you are forgeting a couple o' things which might just turn back on you (preferably in a scarier and hungrier version).

For instance:
"These organisms are like nanomachines. We know their genetic code, hence the isntructions required to produce them bla bla bla" says the MIT guru. Yeah. The only problem is that microorganisms are not machines. Unlike machines, microorganisms have this annoying tendency of replicating. Plus, they mutate all the time. What if some little bugger genetically engineered to perpetrate cities and stuff develops taste for human flesh?

Furthermore, the ecosystem is more chaotic than most corporate executives believe. Maybe if you release some bug that say, eats toxic waste, this bug also render other bugs extinct. Maybe the bug is a carier for bacteria that kill me, you, and the other bug whose crap cures cancer and hasn't been discovered yet.

There is a solution to environmental pollution. Stop polluting the bloody environment that much! Use smaller cars, don't use CFC, find alternatives to oil, recycle. But these things do not immediately translate into money, so we get stupidities of all kinds instead. Money-making stupidities in fact...

Don't eat me

[SoftwareTechie]

News headline:

All life on Earth mysteriously disappears.
In other news, health officials are worried about the increased incidence of obesity in carbon-eating bacteria.

--

Ringworld

[lonely]

Hi,

Just go through reading ringworld by Larry Niven, this had an interesting scenario of a dyson "ring" that had apparently lost it technology.

It turned out that all civilisation had been lost due to little microbes eat all there high temperature semiconductors. With not power all of a sudden it was not possible to boot-strap into any other form of technology.

One quote in the book was about the fact that on earth polythene had to be abbandoned as too many things have been trained to eat it. :-)

It'd be cool if....

[Snafoo]

Some big, suspicious corporation with many millions of dollars of PCB-filled waste containers slowly and secretly rusting in the Boston harbour could genetically engineer a microbe to take those PCBs and rip off the chlorine molecule so as to reduce the stuff to harmless saltwater.

But wait, this all sounds familiar...

Hold yer horses

[Hoeken]

"Pseudomonas, while a member of a family of significant human pathogens, is also one of the most versatile biochemical factories on earth. It has more different chemical reactions that it can do than almost any other organism and could handle a variety of toxic waste," it added. Does anyone else see the danger in applying mutations to a human pathogen?

Lead-lined cell walls?

[imkonen]

"Abraham hopes scientists can find a way to use the bacterium to clean up nuclear waste. "

Okay...I'll buy that you can make a hardier bacterium capable of withstanding high doses of radiation, but how is it actually going to CLEAN the waste? Radioactivity is a property of the individual atoms making up the waste. Digestion, even genetically engineered superbug digestion, is limited to making and breaking chemical bonds, not atom-smashing.

They already dump mutant bugs on oil spills, but that's because the difficulty there is recollecting all the oil, and the bugs can digest it and render it less harmfull to the environment. The key is that you don't have to go back later and clean up the bugs...they presumably die off when the oil is gone. The problem with nuclear waste isn't usually the spills so much as the fact that it has to be stored for 10000's of years before the radiation has dissipated enough. Even if you do have a nuclear waste spill and you dump some superbugs on it, you still have to clean up the now radioactive superbugs in order to remove the detrimental effects of the spill.

Re:Lead-lined cell walls?

[Cy Guy]

how is it actually going to CLEAN the waste? Radioactivity is a property of the individual atoms making up the waste.

I had the same problem with the write-up. It says there are bugs that eat carbon, well hell, I eat carbon too, that doen't mean I don't also excrete carbon. I'm assuming they meant they ate carbon dioxide and/or monoxide bonded it with something else like hydrogen to produce hydro-carbons or calcium to produce harmless calcium carbonate.

Cleaning up nuclear waste

[Veramocor]

IANANES (I am not a nuclear environmental specialist) but the bugs can do one of two things in nuclear waste. First clean up the non-nuclear hazerdous waste, like the bugs eating say PCBS in an area which is also radioactive. The second thing they can do is oxidize or reduce radioactive element. Say for instance you have radioactive element X with a valence charge of 2+, the bug reduces the element to a charge of 0. Thus the radioactive element, while still radioactive, may be less likely to leach with water further down into the ground.

Re:Cleaning up nuclear waste

[capt.Hij]

Actually you want the bug to bind the radioactive waste into a molecule that is chemically more reactive. The idea is that the new molecule will be more likely to react with the surrounding media and hence will "stick" to it. If the new molecule is inactive it will simply flow through the media along with the fluid it is immersed in.

Re:Ronco InstaGerm Plus

[Sgt York]

Ummm....what do you think most of what WE eat is?

Carbohydrates: CnOnH2n

Fats: long hydroCARBON chains with a carboxylic acid at one end

Protein: Amino acid chains, comprised of mostly carbon (by mass) The things on this planet that don't use carbon based compounds as their primary energy source are the exotic ones.

Yes, plants included.

Re:here we go

[Sgt York]

"We can make bugs that eat carbon dioxide"

Yeah, it's called ALGAE. It's just a minor one, though. Probably just the most common orgsanism on the planet by biomass.

As for the "trees where it is barren today" I'm all for it, provided those barren areas are the places we made barren

Re:here we go

[warp365]

I know it's a little late for a reply, but my point is: humans did not MAKE algae. Algae was here before we were. We can't just go and make life...I know we try (i.e. cloning), but it's probably going to just end up biting us in the ass.