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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.
Quite the reverse, I am quite positive these species have been engineered to clean landfills of heavy metals that are otherwise very difficult to extract. There is no other direct reason to engineer plants other than the mining benefit. The mining benefit is very likely commercially, but definately politically, secondary to cleaning (often suburban) areas of waste.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Riddle me this batman, which of these two cases presents a harder clean-up problem: 100 kg of lead powdered into a fine dust and bound to the soil as various metalic salts, or a 100 kg brick of lead? The problem that is trying to be addressed here is large-scale soil contamination, where the toxic compounds are distributed and diffuse. The original title to this slashdot story (in the grand slashdot tradition) is completely misleading about the goals here, a better title would have been something like "Using plants to concentrate soil contamination for further processing" but that did not have the same tabloid appeal I guess.
At some point someone should to a bit of examination of past slashdot stories and give the rest of us a bit of feedback on which slashdot editors actually read the articles they are linking to and have the brain cells necessary to understand the content of these links. While I dispair for the future any of the slashdot editors have in fields related to science and technology, they can always fall back to a career with the Weekly World News...