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New Bacterium Lives On Caffeine
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "A newly-described species of bacterium, Pseudomonas putida has been found to live on pure caffeine. The little jaspers metabolize caffeine into carbon dioxide and ammonia. They were found living in a flower bed on the University of Iowa campus, not in the drain of an espresso machine as one might expect. The paper presenting the research will be presented at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in New Orleans this month where caffeine metabolism will have to contend with the traditional ethanol metabolism."
But when I ingest caffeine it just makes my pee smell like coffee.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Word is they were pretty hard to find at first, on account of them vibrating right off the slide.
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It's called the Sales Department.
...are they good programmers?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You can't just go around metabolizing people's caffeine and expect no retribution. We need that caffeine to survive boring meetings.
Kill it! Kill it with fire! It must be stopped! Don't let it take our caffeine!
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Fizzy ammonia doesn't do it for me.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Stay away from my precious!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
from the spit-it-out-you-wee-bastard department
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Come on, Slashdot! Pseudomonas putida is not new! Chemists have been using it for the biochemical oxidation of aromatic compounds for decades. The CBB5 designator, as boring as it is, is the new species identifier.
"One swallows the lie that flatters, but sips the bitter truth drop by drop." --Diderot
So how much heat can these little guys produce metabolizing caffeine? Because if it's substantial, you could feed them coffee grounds, and use the heat to power a coffee machine...
Methylene chloride does the job quite well, with minimal effect on taste, but some people get scared when they hear that a solvent has touched their coffee beans (never mind that it's long gone). As a result, decaf often is processed by some crappy extraction method. If you can get the real solvent stuff, it's quite good. Heck, you could even make your own... and once you pour off the methylene chloride, you can rotovap it and extract your caffeine for when you need it. (If you've got a liquid nitrogen trap, you can even recover the methylene chloride this way.)
I have a hard enough time even bothering to use my bean grinder!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Why would you need a liquid nitrogen trap? Methylene chloride boils at 39 point something C.
Supercritical CO2 is a good solvent for decaffeination and presents no hazard of residue (even if the process gets screwed up) and better workplace safety.
Softwarium Developerium?