Slashdot Mirror
Mining Metals Using Plants and Trees?
elroySF writes "An MIT Technology Review article says "...Scientists reported Monday that they have bioengineered a plant capable of absorbing arsenic from soil and sequenced the complete set of genes for a microbe that can remove heavy metals from water." It goes on to say "...Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil."
" We had a story about this a while back.
Can you imagine you walk into an arsenic mine that looks like a peach orchard and decide to sample the goods?
It's cool that people are engineering plants and critters to concentrate these potentially toxic compounds...but what happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.
Also, some plants already concentrate arsenic in their seeds. (It's been a while since I heard this, but I seem to recall it's either apples or apricots.)
Oh yeah. First post!
Oh, go on, check out my job.
"Money doesn't grow on trees!"
Now I can finally reply, Some of them got GOLD leaves!!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
almost neo-alchemy, this would be great though, mining has really destroyed a lot of the environment around my state (wisconsin), most people think mining is physically diging out ore deposits and whatnot, actually IIRC current mining tecniques involve pumping poisins into the soil that deslove whatever minerals they want then they pump them back up and extract what they want
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I read an article in New Scientist several years ago about how the British authorities have planted a number of metal fixing plants in the vicinity of the Firth bridge to absorb the residue from the noxious paint used on the bridge.
If spraying our forests and fields wasn't enough, we are going to unleash plants that can extract dangerous compounds from the earth, for our animals to later eat?
Instant Karma's gonna get you - John Lennon
"Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil"
How will you mine the minerals? I understand the concept of getting them out of the ground, but after that where will you get them out of the tree/plant/weed?
If you don't know what Zoo Blacklisting is, click here.
The plant efficiently pumps arsenic from the soil and stores it in its leaves, where it can be easily harvested and disposed of.
Presumably, said plant is efficiently pumping arsenic from a Superfund site containing large amounts of..."disposed" arsenic!
Do I detect circular logic here?
WHERE THE HELL DO YOU DUMP THE PLANTS? (Another Superfund site?)
It's the choice of an old and tired generation!
Chew on this!
Feeling down? Don't stick around! Genetically Engineered Arsenic Tobacco - Jack Kervorkian Chew!
oh I forgot...
2. ???
3. Profit!
System : Biosphere
Critical Values ('there are no Monotone Values in Biology' G. Bateson Mind & Nature '
homeostatsis
runaway
positive feedback (sex and death)
negative feedback
good luck
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
So, amazingly, Ronnie had it wrong - it's not the trees that pollute, it's the trees that will clean up the shit you pump into the earth !
Rejoice, Rejoice, and take your SUV for another spin round the block.
This is more along the lines of cleanup or bioremediation, where organic methods of agglutinating very disperse amounts of something dangerous (heavy metals, arsenic, etc. in the soil/aquifer/etc.) into larger, more manageable clumps without disposing of the substrate wholesale. The article mentions things like cleaning up oil spills with bacteria and removing toxic metals from soil. This isn't a technique to remove large, concentrated deposits of metals from the ground, it's actually much the opposite: it removes scattered, relatively small amounts from the environment in a way that facilitates their safe(r) disposal.
It's called Command & Conquer.
How do we control these plants? What happens if they get into the wild, which would eventually happen due to human error. I cant even imagine the impact these plants would have on our ecosystem. On the other hand, can we genetically engineer some plants to repair our ozone layer quicker? Has anyone ever thought of that?
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
What I would like to know is how they plan to get the base minerals, considering soils have tyically minimal mineralization and the elements tend to be in very low concentrations.
I would think that this would only work for rare earth elements and the like, not so good for base metals.
Still, after seeing what mining does to the landscape, anything is better.
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside" -- Calvin
Think of it! Now you can potentially go do your environmental duty and turn a profit. Bob Q Genesplicer buys up the rights to the tailings from a mine..and just goes out to harvest once per x time period.
They're right to be concerned about the spread of the genes, but if they were to tie in a sterility gene (the so-called terminator technology might be an example of this) very closely to the gene that adds this new behavior, I think we're really underway!
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
. . . or you'll end up like Stan here:
l
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_683401.htm
Plant a tree... build resources... conquer your enemy.
Time to resign!
Does anyone have any more useful links than this one? I know it's in Nature, so there's probably not a free site that directly links the article, but are there any more brain heavy synopses of this article anywhere?
I am interested in several things:
1) what does the Arsenic turn into (chemically speaking). Does the plant change the chemical bonding? I think that most aresnic is stored as sodium arsenate (I could be wrong) if it changes it to something more managable, it would be much better than if it simply concentrates it. HOWEVER, concentrating it is, by itself, an incredible step forward. Period.
2) is it possible to seed these as "suicide" plants, EG: plants that produce no pollen or seeds?
hmmmm?
The plants are probably just a first step.
Obviously, you harvest the plants and cart them away once they have done their work.
You could burn the plants under controlled conditions and chemically extract the arsenic -- a metal, as I recall -- from the ash.
Even if you didn't burn 'em:
If the plants are really concentrating the stuff, you'll have far less waste to deal with. Say, ten tons of branches and leaves rather than one hundred tons of soil. They might still end up in barrels in dumps, but there will be far fewer barrels.
Also isn't it the Monarch Butterfly that deposits 24k gold bands on the outside of it's chrysalis?
I think we as a species are doing a very poor job of taking advantage of some of the biology going on around us.
We're not seeing the forest through the trees so to speak.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
In the neal Stephanson book "Zodiac" bio-engineered microbes are used to clean up Boston Harbour with some unexpected and nasty results. It is just fiction, but a good read and along the same lines at this story.
Now I have avoid rocks AND metal grass when I mow the lawn?
The concept of using plants for bioremediation has been around for many years. I read about a fern that sucks up arsenic months (maybe years) ago. Perfectly natural ferns, no bioengineering involved.
And, yes, there is danger of people and animals being exposed to the heavy metals (and other toxics) absorbed by the plants. You can't just build a bioremediation field and forget about it. You've gotta keep the people and critters safe.
"...Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil." That demonstrates why some people calling themselves 'scientists' should stick to their fields. Sucking up miniscule amounts of metals with plants would only deplete the 'crustal abundance' of minerals within the narrow range of plant roots, and the average American requires over 45,000 pounds of newly-mined minerals every year. I work in the mineral industry, and I am a scientist. This smells like a grant proposal that got by someone. Suckers!
But I been told I type with a Southern accent before!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
What we need in Oz is a tree that can stand high salinity and absorb some of the excess salt to help fix the problems caused by over irrigation. It's going to take a very long time to fix with natural plants.
Eventually the trees and grass will form their own unions and demand increased safety measurements and pay. Then again, lots of animals pee on trees. Maybe that will balance it out.
The topic of this article is highly misleading. One would think plants were capable of mining for metals like iron, copper or various mined good, while the real use is cleaning up the soil from any heavy-metal contamination, such as the arsenic example. A more practical use in the local neighbohrhood for this would be to clean the ground around older gas stations or clean the ground of heavy-metals where there used to be a steel mill.
Hate me!
The night elves have been mining gold with a tree for thousands of years.
The first group of researchers added a gene from the E. coli bacteria and one from soybeans to make Arabidopsis thaliana, a distant relative of cabbage, develop its taste for arsenic.... The plant efficiently pumps arsenic from the soil and stores it in its leaves, where it can be easily harvested and disposed of.
Oh, sure, as if cabbage didn't taste bad enough already....
This is nothing new. Many companies have been doing this for a very long time.
/. article from last week on this0 /16472 02.shtml?tid=126
r LM.html
1 282,6908,0 0.html
e s. htm
i cations/E nvUpdates/Summer98/article5.html
m ed iation/1/msg00000.html
/ refle ction/articles/waste/machine.html
m ent/livi ngmachines.html
. ht ml
m ent/heroe s/heroesgallery/0,2967,todd,00.html
Here is a
http://science.slashdot.org/science/02/09/3
Ocen Arks International:
http://www.oceanarks.org/LM/Frame
a decent Wired.com article:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,
also see: http://www.berea.edu/sens/living_machine.htm
The Buckminster Fuller Institute
http://www.bfi.org/Trimtab/fall00/living_machin
This UK company
http://www.ltluk.com/
a Battelle Enviro Update article
http://www.battelle.org/Environment/publ
An article from HUD
http://www.hud.gov/local/boi/ie100601.html
The notice from the 1993 confrence on living machines:
http://www.ibiblio.org/london/agriculture/biore
Some info from LSU
http://www.biology.lsu.edu/webfac/cramcharan
Rockbourne Enviro
http://www.rockbourne.net/WastewaterTreat
Korte Organica
http://www.korte.hu/technologies/living_machine
This Time.com article
http://www.time.com/time/reports/environ
The truely terrifing aspects are the use of microbes to refine Uranium from simple mine tailings. (Wired Mag.)
I dream of landfills being mined by Von Neuman Machines and gene taylored bacteria. I of the silica trees of Naussca cleaning the plutonium out of the soil. I dream of the darkness between the stars.
F34nor
-If we stay on this rock we're all going to die.
Imagine how much of a difference it would make (to developed countries at least). Countries such as Australia would be able to wave goodbye to water shortages. ..just a thought
(although I can't imagine it being feasible for farming irrigation)
Rob
One method of removing heavy metals from a heavily polluted area(old factory site, for example) is to plant the entire grounds with trees. Soft pines are often used, for example. As the trees grow and absorb minerals through their roots, they take up almost all of the polluting metals over time and store them in their needles and bark.
There are companies that can be hired to plant and maintain small "cleaning forests" over a period of ten to twenty years, to make sure no one else is harvesting the lumber, and to treat or remove trees that become ill. It's actually very useful, a cheap, efficient(compared to digging up the soil and chemically treating it), and very clean method of getting dangerous substances out of the ground.
Maybe this phenomena causes the same thing that has caused vitamin levels to drop in fruits and vegetables
Oh, wait, they already do that. Um, yay! ;P
My deviantArt site
for my GOLD tree!
Why am I reminded of command and conquer, and the concept of Tiberium?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
If I recall correctly, they've been using sunflowers in New Jersey to clean up superfund sites. Could there be a way, therefore, to use such plants for nuclear waste/contamination areas, for later harvest and recycling/reclamation/disposal? After all, certain instances of radioactive waste includes metallic compounds.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Straight up
in the original C&C there were plants that did this (at least i was always led to believe they were plants)--they extracted all manner of valuable metals and secreted it in the form of crystals...mind you those things were highly toxic and energetic enough that humans would combust upon prolonged exposure but hey, its just a game= =)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
"The science of phytoremediation"? What next?
Should we think up a classification of sciences to turn the veritable zoo into an organized system? *cough* Peirce *cough*
Not that the parent post wasn't good -- I agree fully with it!
They've used metal mining as a cover story before ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
Unless they made the plant somehow resistant to arsenic, aren't we basically engineering it to commit suicide for our benefit? Granted, it is just a plant, but aren't there some unsettling moral connotations of this? There has never been an organism that has acted in this way. This plant is probably the first decidedly non-human "unnatural" life on this planet.
"What happened to the car son?"
"Sorry Dad! I left it outside in the rain - the moss got to it and chewed up all the sheetmetal!"
"We've had success with a number of elements", reports Dr. Grimm of the University of California at Berkeley, "but we've had the greatest success with metals, especially nonreactive metals." His competitor at Sandia National Labs, Dr. Anderson, isn't quite as confident. "Golden egg laying geese! That's just the stuff of fairytales".
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
There's a short article on the findings and also some mention of the concept of phytomining.
involving gold instead of pollutants. Obviously, this research has been a dead end. And let's face it, Gold is a hell of a lot more valuable than a tree full of pollutants. It takes a team of lawyers, 10 years and a gulliable jury to make pollutants "valuable".
"...Some scientists even see the day when trees and grasses will be used to mine metals and minerals without disturbing the soil." ...That sounds suspiciously familiar to this one scheme I've heard of that people apparently have been doing for centuries. They plant these special "seeds" in the ground that grow and harvest tons of minerals. When the plant is big enough and the time is right, they EAT it. Fugging weirdos.
---------------------------
A large amount of our water problems have to do with burning fossil fuels with heavy metals. Why? Plants have always been pretty at good at absorbing nasty stuff like arsenic, mercury, etc. We burn the coal/oil/whatever, and that stuff goes into the atmosphere, gets absorbed by clouds, and then gets into the water cycle. Then we find this stuff in the our water and fish.
It gets in the fish because algae and water lilys also absorb the metals pretty well. Then fish eat the algae...Note that if you live in the Northeast US (like I used to), you can't eat freshwater fish anymore. All the lakes (with a few exceptions) are polluted with mercury, even the ones far far away from industrial factories.
So modifying plants to absorb more heavy metals is just going to cause problems for 1) future generations (granted it takes a helluva long time for plants to die and make coal, but still...), and 2) current people who hunt for food (like when Mr. Deer comes over and nibbles on that arsenic-laden blueberry bush).
Since when is taking toxic material out of the ground and letting it sit on the surface (where rain washes it into rivers, animals eat it...people eat it) a good idea? Maybe it will keep it out of aquafers in the short term, but it is still going to cause more problems than it's worth.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Sounds like Tiberain Plants to me.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
Plants are engineered to suck up arsenic from the ground. They're planted on a landfill somewhere.
Random insects come and nibble at the tree. They burrow holes in the bark. They feed on the roots. These insects ingest the arsenic you are removing, and... insert it into the ecosystem.
Birds eat the insects from the tree, concentrating the arsenic inside themselves. Mosquitoes feed on the birds. Birds of prey or, perhaps snakes, eat the birds and their eggs. Leaves from the tree are blown off by a strong storm, landing in a nearby lake, and contaminating it with arsenic.
Arsenic finds its way into the ecosystem on a macro scale, and starts wreaking havoc.
Plants are the foundation of the ecosystem. Using them to harvest toxic chemicals is a BAD IDEA. You can never keep the area completely quarantined. You can never ensure that no insects or animals will feed upon the plants as they are growing.
If this ever comes to pass, expect to see local ecosystem poisoning on a massive scale around the test sites.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Why bioengineer a plant when you already have one that will clean up heavy metals (among many other uses)
Oh yeah, the plant that already does that is illegal cuz it cut into DuPont and Hearst's cash flow in 1937.
Posting as AC for a reason - gotta go Feds kicking in d
My mother in law likes coleslaw...
ok, so the article claims the cabbagey plant can absorb aresenic into its leaves, and then the plant can be disposed of. How? Isn't that how arsenic got there in the first place?
I suppose they would seal it into steel drums, or maybe bury it, but then you end up with a giant pile of supertoxic waste instead of minute amounts of it all over.
i dooon't get it.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Biology has been used for quite a while to extract gold from certain types of ores. Particularly gold. I'd like to make a practical point though. It's unbelievable that one would process ore using plants to extract the targeted element. There are already so many tried and proven methods to process materials extremely cheaply. I really don't think the idea is even practical for the mining industry (can you imagine waiting 5 years or more before getting a return on your capital). Perhaps as other posters have suggested the technology might have some relevance for environmental projects, but not mining.
and there are currently two main uses for it, cleanup of heavy and toxic metals eg arsnic, lead, platinum etc and mining. I was listening to the CBC the other night and they had a representative from a Canadian mining company on talking about their pilot for the first commercial scale mining using hyperaccumulating plants to remove extra metal from mining trailings. He estimated that a very large scale deployment of a certain species that was a natural hyperacculutaor for whatever they were mining would increase their yields by aprox 5 percent which came out to some 10K tons a year! Not only that but the plant also accumulated some heavy metals used in the mining process and so would help clean up the site.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
That was the first thought I had.
Doesn't anyone here play Command and Conquer?
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
Mel Chin had already successfully done this in his work entitled "Revival Field" at the Pig's Eye Landfill in St. Paul Minnesota. Here he traps heavy metals and toxins in the soil leaving it untainted when he is done harvesting... at least that is the goal.. and so far it has been somewhat sucessfull. You can read more about it here satorimedia.com. I'm sure there are other articles out there about his research, but I found him in one of my text books entitled Art on the Edge and Over by Linda Weintraub....
We could all benefit from my education.
Where you can play the evil brotherhood of Nod and cause all kinds of Tiberium De-forestation?
And people credit Star Trek for being visionary because of cell phones. Sheesh.
This just made me think of something, what is to stop animals from still eating the stuff. I mean, you grow this giant grass field in the hopes gather up some arsenic, but deer live there too. They eat the plants die of poisoning, or they become easy meat(literally speaking) for carnivores. The arsenic accomulation ends up killing off the wolves/bears/rabid squirrels that eat deer.
So now that are good intentions have gone astray, and we throw the eco-system out of balance again, so I wonder did anyone think of that?
What about using a similar technique to strip pollutants out of the air in smoggy cities?
Develop a tree or plant that absorbs carbon monoxide from the air, or something similar, then tear down half of downtown LA and replant.
If you also get the normal CO2-->02 oxygen scrubbing benefits of the tree, it can do double-duty.
and all the other woodland creatures. Also, can't forget about the insects that naturally feed on these plants.
It's easy to keep humans from eating these plants; however, there are always the ones that don't read the warning signs and jump the barbed wire fence we'll read about in the Darwin awards.
But what will happen to the animals, insects, fungi, bacteria, etc that will feed on these plants?
And what happens when the leaves fall off the trees? When they decay won't they contaminate the soil
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
Ever since I read in the World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid that the ocean contains something like 9 pounds of gold for every man, woman and child I've wondered when somebody would find a way to get it. I know people have been working on it, and I had heard about evidence of a naturally occuring gold-fixing bacterium before. Apparently, some ores contain gold structures that look like organs or excrement from bacteria.
Just Google using gold/ocean/bacteria as search terms and you'll find some interesting stuff.
This is why I laugh when some idiot on CNBC says "gold is a good investment". Not only has it been a crappy investment historicly, but mining tech is always improving. One good breakthrough to get the gold out of seawater and poof! It's just that gold has been doing well lately, so now you've actually got people pitching gold the way they pitched dot-coms.
However, I can understand why the gold stocks make sense. When the price of gold goes up just a little, pits that were worthless suddenly become valuable. Paradoxicly, companies with low grade ore pits actually get a bigger boost (of course it works painfully in the other direction when the price of gold falls).
So, if you don't believe that companies that rely on a valuable commodity won't find a way to make it cheaper coughChipFabscough! then by all means buy gold and sock it away in your basement.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Mines in South Africa have been using microbes to concentrate metals for many years.
I also find it hard to believe that mines in America are so backward that they still use arsenic for gold extraction. South African mines have stopped doing that a hundred years ago. If they would still be using arsenic, Johannesburg and surrounding area would be uninhabitable by now!
make fertilizer, so we can grow more plants, so we can make more fertilizer, so we can. . .
Isn't this what the ad said was wrong with cocaine?
KFG
I can't remember the title or author, but it involved humans on a vitually metal-less planet, after the fall of interplanetary civilization.
Basically, at harvest time, everybody went to the fields and watched each other eat their share of the plants that soaked up the trace elements. The practice killed a few over time due to metal poisoning, but it was their only way to acquire metal. (I guess they got it from the dead.) They had **long** range plans for space travel.
So this is how capitalism will come to an end... With no need to purchase energy, nor mine minerals, and robots which do all the labour.. the days of Star Trek are coming...
not to be facetious, but what about some research to introduce photosynthetic genes into humans. or these heavy metal leaching genes to absorb and collect the toxic metals in dead tissue like fingernails or hair in human beings. you could wallow in mud in the sun and put on weight...solve the food problem in future, too.
Just to be a contrarian... Most of the places they're talking about are wastelands, nothing grows there right now. They'd probably have to fence it off, but I'm pretty sure the wildlife factor is REAL low (assuming we're talking about mine tailings and the like)...
hmmmm?
And people thought he was nuts, yet Snow crash was hailed as a quasi blueprint, and now the diamond age is coming about.
--Strange is it not?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Tiberium. Anyone else here waste too much time playing CnC ?
On a related note, I have a feeling that something that WILL materialize is Star Trek style transporter technology. Then, downloading and transferring stuff around the Internet will take on a whole new meaning.
For example, there will be enormous warehouses around the world that deal in raw materials. You could, for example, transfer a specified amount of hydrogen from one source and an amount of oxygen from another directly to a heating chamber where they will form droplets of water which can then be downloaded. Meals will be downloaded from the Internet, complete with dishes which will then be re-uploaded to be taken care of by the company (so you don't have to wash dishes).
People will also beam themselves around, over the Internet. There will be encryption and tunneling and stuff going on to protect your "image" and there will be transporter crackers who will specialize in intercepting people's transportation and turning them into frogs and stuff. So it will be dangerous to transport around. Then, just when you thought it was safe, it will also become possible, through cracking your server, to enter your property and stuff! How convenient!
Oh wait... I'm describing the future as if Microsoft is going to control this transporter technology.
Just build big bioreactors and feed megatons of topsoil into them. The end product should be clean soil and very, very radioactive [dead] bacteria, which can be treated as concentrated high level waste.
(This would also come in handy in parts of Nevada and at the US military nuclear sites, where the problem is dealing with radioisotopes dispersed in the soil and ground water.)
Arthur C. Clarke described a "golden reef," in which several species of coral were genetically engineered to extract gold from sea water, in his book "Imperial Earth," published in 1976. In a rather detailed passage, he describes his corals as being up to ten per cent gold, but states that the gold extraction feature weakened the health of the coral, so that they suffered from parasitism and disease and required regular gardening and maintenance to remain viable.
I was talking to Phil Rutter of Badgersett Research Farm who grows hybrid hazel bushes. He says that hazels absorb large amounts of manganese (>2000 ppm) & other metals & store them in their leaves. He thinks they do this to make the leaves less palatable for deer browsing.
How awful.
After these assholes in the Genetic Engineering
community have their way we will no longer be able to use wood to heat our houses without worrying about poisoning the air with heavy metals.
With the selfish narcissim of the GE industry never end?
Artnan Process 1941
Bacteria or some such to isolate and refine heavy metals
You can either gather the plants and burn them to concentrate the heavy metals or compost them and replant in the compost to concentrate the metals even more. The great thing about the plants is that they filter a lot of contaminated water (which essentially ends up as distilled rain) over their lifetime with out burning oil for industrial processing or using industrial chemicals. And it is cheep too.
In developed areas there is a lot of lead contamination around old houses (lead paint) and cities (leaded gasoline), or mercury from florescent lights. Uranium from depleted bullets (which turn into a power aerosol upon impact) has just as strong a organiometallic effect as arsenic.
All of these things can turn you madder than a hatter (this is an old phrase resulting from the use of mercury in the hat making industry at one time. Or as dull as a printer (lead pigment used in news paper ink until the unions forced a change). But it depends on which part of the brain dies first.
These heavy metals have been used in a variety of things that people bring into their homes. In fact a large number of cosmetics are exceedingly poisonous because there are no regulations on what can be in them. Ever wonder what the active ingredient is in those hair dyes for men whose beards are turning white, its lead acetate. Remember, you are what you eat, drink and absorb through your skin. Moonshine isn't the only source of lead poisoning these days!
The real danger with mining GMO plants is that the genes responsible for metal accumulation will be transferred to other plants. This is especially hazardous in food crops where many of these metals are toxic. We could easily be poisoning ourselves if these genes get transfered (accidentally or though crop-bioterrorism) to our food plants. These metal-mining GMOs should be treated like smallpox: stored away, mostly destroyed, and guarded against.
> 1) what does the Arsenic turn into (chemically
> speaking). Does the plant change the chemical
> bonding? I think that most aresnic is stored as
> sodium arsenate (I could be wrong) if it changes
> it to something more managable, it would be much
> better than if it simply concentrates it. HOWEVER,
> concentrating it is, by itself, an incredible step
> forward. Period.
Yep. Um, the arsenic might get converted into another arsenic compound, but that's not going to help a whole lot: arsenic pretty much sucks no matter what you mix it with.
> 2) is it possible to seed these as "suicide"
> plants, EG: plants that produce no pollen or
> seeds?
Well, sure, induce trisomy to a chromosome, such as is done for seedless grapes/watermelons/etc with hormone supplements. However, no significant amount of arsenic would spread with the pollen, so what's the point?
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I'm a mining consultant and have worked around Arsenic containing effuents in the past. Typical way to 'treat' arsenic is to fix it into a stable, non water soluble form. We typically use ferric sulphate to treat effuents containing arsenic, resulting in a 'reasonably' stable arsenic ferrosulpate sludge. This you can dump soil on and plant trees as the arsenic is not likely to spontaneously jump out of the solid into solution.
Another more brute force way of doing the same thing is using a high-pressure autoclave to achieve the same result. Not naming names, but there is a mine located inside the city limits of a Canadian provincial/territorial capital that uses an autoclave the fix arsenic from both a solid trioxide form and a mineral arsenopyrite form. The device works so well that the federal gov't has considered asking this mine to assist cleanup of a neighbouring arsenic contaminated site.
The use of bioreator tanks for sulphide leaching is practised in Africa. I don't think they accept arsenic in the plant feeds, but it is only a matter of time before they find the right thermophile bugs to fix arsenic, then there will be another industrial route for getting the stuff into the tailings pond where it belongs!
-AD
The arsenic accomulation ends up killing off the wolves/bears/rabid squirrels that eat deer.
The piles and stench of said dead animals would hopefully serve as a warning to others.
S
Perhaps the best cyanide fact to keep in mind is that before you die of cyanide poisoning, you'll probably get extremely ill and at that point you can still be saved by drinking some sodium thiosulphate. Almost any photo shop will have some. If you're working with cyanide keep some handy. It's easy to come by.
I love dropping the hammer on conservative closet queers.
Watch your back bitch.