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Bacteria Used To Fix Cracked Concrete
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the UK's University of Newcastle have created a new type of bacteria that generates glue to hold together cracks in concrete structures — that means everything from concrete sidewalks to buildings that have been damaged by earthquakes. When the cells have been germinated, they burrow deep into the concrete until they reach the bottom. At this point, the concrete repair process is activated, and the cells split into three types that produce calcium carbonate crystals, act as reinforcing fibers, and produce glue which acts as a binding agent to fill concrete gaps."
I think it's officially "the future".
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
How is it gonna stop? when they run out of concrete to fill, when they overpopulate and eat all the concrete "cracks" or when they kill all humans and we can't record the moment it stops because there won't be any humans to observe it?
Well, since grey goo is such an abstract concept, they thought they would rather use something more concrete ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I can't come in today, my street has a bad cold.
You do realize that most waste products that can be used as you mentioned contain toxins themselves? Bottom ash and fly ash from coal plants is comparable to nuclear waste.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
What's the acidity of your lungs? Oh, I see. You didn't read the article. Carry on, then.
Gigacrete looks like a better material for building in my opinion. I'll just have bacteria in my yogurt for now.
Nice GigaCrete advert but the bacteria isn't presented as a replacement for concrete or GigaCrete. It's presented as a mechanism to repair existing concrete.
Or are you advocating we raze all existing concrete buildings and tear up all sidewalks?
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
I think that whole nanobot grey goo problem is way overhyped. Biological organisms are much more advanced than our technology and they haven't been able to turn all matter into copies of themselves yet, despite their best efforts.
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
They said the binder was 100% non-toxic. which is only a small percentage of the product (as filler is the rest, up to 80%).
To see another example of "green" being a fib, look up AggRite construction/pavement aggregate.
React to the specific PH of the concrete? If only all concrete were the same. Its been in use for several hundred years, and the formula has been constantly evolving.
Remember Monsanto and "roundup ready" seeds? Now imagine a "bio-healing ready" concrete... concrete that is differentiated by a specific compound formula which is standardized for a specific bacteria (of course several grades of the product combo will exist for both quality and usage differences ... which also allow for market segmentation)
All it will take is some enterprising megacorp with the legal muscle to patent this combo (and defend the patents) and you can effectively raised margin on concrete 10x at least.
Anything can be de-commoditized if it provides unique value and a big enough megacorp.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
This engineered bacterium system was entered into the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, so there's a lot more information about this project at the team's project page. In particular, there's a more thorough description of the kill switch the team engineered to prevent the spread of this bacterium beyond the target environment, the underlying mechanism being that sucrose must be available in the environment to prevent the bacterium from producing a toxin which kills itself.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
So basically, it had nothing at all do with the topic hand and your comparison "I'll just have bacteria in my yogurt for now" was completely meaningless since no one has suggested building new things with it since that wouldn't work anyway.
The spores germinate only in very alkaline environments... ...but the bases are nominally covered.
I see what you did there.
I'm disabling ads until because I choose not to reward redesigns that are less usable than "view source".
Absolute worst case scenario is a grey goo outbreak being treated basically like a fire (which, when you think about it is the ultimate grey goo machine). There's a limit to how much energy is available for replication, and there's a limit on how efficient you can make your replication (at some level, the replicating nanobots will be literally tearing apart and putting back together materials). Fighting the grey goo only involves tearing about the replicators, not necessarily wasting energy putting the pieces back together into something useful.
In other words, it should be trivial to design a nanobot that tears apart the self-replicators but doesn't waste energy by making copies of itself. This nanobot would be manufactured a head of time and stored for future use, or manufactured in specialist facilities (even in a mobile truck if necessary) that provide the energy input necessary for their production. As long as your facilities have more energy available than the self-replicators do, you'll win out eventually. And the replicators will only have about as much energy available as a fire can produce.
Also, the concrete repair activity is produced by upregulation of genes natural to Bacillus subtilis, not by anything transgenic. The upregulation of these genes presents an energy cost to the engineered bacterium while providing no benefit- if these bacteria mutate, it is more likely to be towards the wild phenotype. In addition, the team responsible has added a kill switch which tells the bacteria to commit suicide if sucrose is not present.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
One has an immune system, and the other looks like concrete.
If you've ever tried to pump glue into a crack in concrete, you'll quickly figure that out. It's somewhere between messy and inadequate as a repair method, and certainly doesn't get into the smaller cracks, let alone the microcracks. The idea here is to have the glue self-extend, filling the air pockets and microcracks that no glue with sufficient surface tension to stick could ever manage.
However I think where this will become a more useful technique is for fixing the kinds of surface cracks that ail structures exposed to repeated wet/freeze/thaw cycles -- the typical winter climate for the east slope of the Rocky Mountains. Mount Rushmore would seem to be a good candidate, since seasonal surface cracking is what's causing damage.
Concrete roads that suffer similar winter freeze/thaw damage could also benefit -- instead of trying to patch the road one crack at a time (usually an exercise in futility, culminating in yawning potholes), or having to dig up and replace the concrete (an extremely expensive job), just wash it with a slurry of this bacteria. That could even eliminate most of the seasonal damage, by filling the microcracks that are where freeze damage starts.
Imagine if your state and local highway departments could reduce their budgets by simply needing to do less repair on concrete-based roads. Even if you don't believe in reducing taxes when need is reduced, it would free up that budget to use elsewhere.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Okay, we've fixed the holes in the concrete, and made holes in people. Seems to me the logical next step is to fill the holes in the people with concrete.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?