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Teen Discovers Plastic-Decomposing Bacteria
ganelo writes to tell us that 16-year-old Waterloo Collegiate Institute student Danel Burd has made quite a stir with his plastic-eating bacteria discovery. For his efforts Burd won top prize at a Canada-wide science fair claiming a $10,000 prize and a $20,000 scholarship. "Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas. A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first."
This is global warming myths 101.
The above is true, and rise in temperatures caused from CO2 are ALSO true.
That is why once you start increasing CO2 levels, it gets warmer FASTER because it triggers even more CO2 to be created, and all of it causes more warming.
Get with the program people. This is science not politics.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
The idea is not to have a plastic-decomposing machine. The problem to be solved is how to deal with plastic that gets buried in a landfill. Even though many people today do a conscious effort to recycle, it's still not enough, there will always be some plastic in the garbage.
With this invention, you just spray the surface with water containing the bacteria, it seeps in and decomposes the old buried plastic, and then the landfill place can be reclaimed for other uses.
"Natural processes are more or less balanced"
That is a rather large assumption and probably untrue, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Age, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle etc etc etc.
Or he registers in an honours co-op degree program at his local university and then his $20k, plus what he earns on co-op work placements, pays for his bachelors degree entirely.
sigs are for suckers
Actually, bacteria mutate fairly quickly as it is. First of all, they don't have nearly the same level of DNA repair ability that eukaryotes (that's all multi-celled creatures and some single-celled) do. Second of all, their sheer numbers are enormous. In a small container, populations many orders of magnitude larger than the human population, can be grown. So out of the huge populations alone, you can expect a much larger overall mutation count.
Finally, different species of bacteria can share genetic material (DNA plasmids) through a type of "mating" called conjugation, allowing species to trade traits with other species.
Any mutations that makes them more efficient reproducers and better able to create energy from their environment is likely to ensure survival and ability to out-reproduce their peers.
Through these various methods, you should get a fairly high rate of mutation. Adding radiation may actually be detrimental to the overall success of the intent. Mutations tend to be detrimental, so if you increase the rate too much, you end up killing them off too fast. You also increase the risk of killing off the small populations with the new positive mutations you want, before they have a chance to spread.
It wouldn't surprise me if you went digging through a bunch of dumps that have been covered up years ago, to find bacteria that have evolved to eat some of that garbage. I suspect that the time required for our garbage to decompose is actually lower than we predict since we don't really factor in the possibility of bacterial mutations which can make them good consumers of the garbage. I suspect these mutations will happen in far less time than the natural decomposition period of the materials in question.