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Panda Poo Yields Key To Cheaper Biofuels
An anonymous reader writes "A new study unveiled at the American Chemical Society points to panda poop as a source of remarkably efficient enzyme-producing bacteria that are able to break down plant materials for cheaper and more efficient biofuel production. Inspired by the giant panda's voracious appetite for bamboo, scientists began to study the fecal matter of giant pandas at the Memphis Zoo. A year of samples indicated that the pandas have a unique ability to convert lignocellulose from plant matter into energy. In fact, gut bacteria of a giant panda can convert 95 percent of the plant's biomass into simple sugars."
So, let me get this straight. A panda has to eat 85 lbs. of bamboo a day just to laze around on its fat ass, only waking up occasionally to stare blankly at zoo patrons like some kind of ursine retard? These are your super-efficient power plants?!? Come on, those pathetic creatures won't even reproduce without some zookeeper to show them where to put it and help them thrust. They're the Urkels of the bear world.
So either bamboo contains almost no energy, or pandas are expending a *lot* of energy somewhere behind our backs. Personally, I think someone should be digging through Grizzly shit. At least *they* have the energy to occasionally maul some back-to-nature hippie.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You'll need to convince pandas to have more panda-sex in order to get enough panda poo to fuel the biofuel for this whole planet as their numbers are in pretty short supply right now. For some reason pandas hate panda-sex, and I have no idea why. It's awesome!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This is it! Scientists are now officially bored!
The bamboo industry is just trying to get us to raise billions of panda, so they can get rich selling us the food.
a use for one of the most useless animals in nature.
When I told them I was going to be a poop scientist!
Just to take a page from Food Inc. :) there will be Panda's being grown in darkened rooms and standing still being fed laxatives through a tube.
We gotta hook up these panda-poo bugs with those newspaper eating bugs from a few hours ago... once they mate and reproduce, we'll solve all the world's problems and live happily ever after in a global utopia.
Seriously, I'm all in favor of this research, I just wish we could get this tech out of the lab an into the local gas station sometime before the next millennium.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Well, ain't that the shit.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Sorry, that link was wrong, it should have been: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/30/2324243/Making-Fuel-With-Newspapers-and-Bacteria
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Is there anything it can't do?
Decomposing shit makes gas, we dont need a fucking story every time someone discovers that bear shit rots just like everything else.
I about said it yesterday over the amazing "compost makes gas" story but they had to go an use some exotic bacteria so it was at least somewhat new
You are just jealous. You wish you were cute and fuzzy and could live the panda lifestyle.
I wouldn't call them 'tards, I'd say they know how to work the system. I don't see anyone hand delivering hippie meat to Grizzlys.
is a mother somewhere talking to her son.
"I spent 50 grand on a college degree and you spend all your time looking at panda poop?"
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
FTFY. I think that's what the article meant...
...this is all a load of crap.
*buh-dum*
some species can grow literally upto a metre per day
While that's accurate, I think it would be misleading to allow it to stand without comment. Bamboo gather energy during the year and store it in their rhizomes. Then they use that energy during the growing season to sprout new shoots. It's these new shoots which may grow that quickly, but only during that season. Any culms from previous years are stuck at whatever height they grew to during their growing year.
What I've said is true of the seven species that I own. Of course there are hundreds of species, so others may exhibit other habits.
I don't own any panda, so I don't have any personal knowledge of their habits, but my understanding is that they eat bamboo leaves. It's the culms that may grow so quickly.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
I thought the big problem right now was not the availability of simple sugars, but the fact that it takes a quite a few gallons of water to make one gallon of ethanol.
I know that people do all sorts of bullshit inflation of the number of gallons of water, where they factor in the irrigation of the crops and all, but it still takes a lot of water to make those simple sugars into ethanol.
Yet, this magical Panda Poo enzyme might come in handy since it can turn inedible plant matter to humans into fuel. Say we turn in the corn stalks, or the enourmous amount of leaves collected every Fall into fuel. Maybe someday there won't be famines, we can ship all our excess grain to the hungry with the power of Panda Poo!
These scientists can expect a C&D letter from China any day now. As is well-known, China owns all Panda-related IP, including Panda-derived bacteria. All research using these illegally-obtained properties therefore belong exclusively to China.
How long until China declares panda pooh, like the panda a protected national icon and insists all panda pooh is shipped back home for repatriation?
Po Panda Power Poo.
I always thought the future was going to be pig shit.
That's a very efficient process to produce energy in the form of sugar with a good byproduct like oxygen.
It's already here, doesn't need further studies, it is broadly and readily available and doesn't require complex and polluting industrial production.
The only point is that humans are not able to make a reasonable and balanced use of them, as they are also needed for feeding the Humanity itself.
But this would be another story.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
You know, the one with Sean Connery finding the cure for cancer in a rain forest only do have it plowed over? We can't get Pandas to reliably reproduce offspring in captivity... and some people are even saying, "Why are we wasting money trying to save some of these animals that don't seem to want to survive?"
Millions years of evolution is a toolbox we can pull parts from. Lost a species, and you loose millions of years of tools. You don't have to give a damn how cute a Panda is. What you should cause concern is our own survival.
I8-D
Bio-fuel is nothing but a pipedream. We waste far too many resources trying to develop it when it just takes far too many resources to create a sufficient supply of one type for the fuel to be a sufficient replacement for anything. It would be one thing if we all created a waste of one type from whatever resource we exhumed, but we don't. There is way too much promise in fields like solar power for us to be spending this much time on bio-fuel.
Maybe Anthony Bourdain's friend wasn't so crazy with his chicken shit vodka idea after all. 95% conversion of biomass to sugar mean shitloads of cheap ethanol.
"Your car is full of shit mate"
"This fuel is pure crap"
"I went and bought some more shit for my car"
and the sorts
It's not even a bear, it's somewhat related to the raccoon, so it's also a fucking liar.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
You never know what they might be good for. Personally, i'm for saving species more from a respect for the infinite complexity of nature. But if you want to convince a society ruled by corporate thinking, this is a strong example of why giving a crap about nature might be useful to the human race.
Other animals already digest cellulose and turn it into simple sugars. Is there any particular advantage to the one found in panda poop? Or do journalists simply like saying "panda poop"?
Can they poop dark matter? Didn't think so.
I think putting a panda on top of my car will screw up the aerodynamics, not to mention add too much weight.
When I read "Panda Poo" I thought this submission was about an upcoming version of Ubuntu.
If ever there was an animal in need of a Darwinian boot to the face, it's the panda. They've evolved to subsist on a primary food source so lacking in nutrition that it just barely keeps them going. So, they're constantly eating or sleeping. The reason the sitting/laying-while-eating image is so iconic is that it's one of the ways they've evolved to maximize energy in-vs-energy used.
But, they are really cute so I guess that excuses their existence. Kind of like an LA trophy wife now that I think about it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It says right there in the summary that it's "remarkably efficient".
"Only a handful of animals are predominantly dependent on bamboo, including the giant panda, red panda, other bamboo lemurs (grey bamboo lemur (Hapalemur griseus) and greater bamboo lemur (Hapalemur simus)) found in Madagascar, and bamboo rats (including Rhizomys sinensis, R. pruinosus, and R. sumatrensis) found in China and Southeast Asia. (Roberts 1992)"
Very, very few animals can digest plant matter efficiently enough to live on bamboo.
It's bad enough that all our sh!t is made in China, without it being a literal fact.
I say we sick a bunch of enraged grizzlies on them to demonstrate our continued superiority. To hell with biofuels. This makes me want panda burgers. ;^)
You identify the problem while simultaneously glossing it over... Yes, plants give us the simple sugars we need for our nutrition, but they devote a majority of their photosynthetic efforts toward complex sugar-polymers bound by lignins (ie: cellulose) which we are unable to digest. Cows, termites, and some other critters are able to digest this stuff with the help of their gut flora, but thus far we have not been able to efficiently mimic this process to produce fuel at an industrial scale.
> they are also needed for feeding the Humanity itself
The point is, we humans don't use this stuff anyway, so it would be handy if we could figure out a way to convert it into fuel. Also, there are plenty of crops, such as switchgrass or hemp, that can be grown on land that is currently not practical for "food" crops like corn or beans. Thus, we could expand our harvest of sunlight for fuel without reducing our output of food calories.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
There are several species that can break down cellulose, however most are terribly inefficient. That's why ruminants like the cow have such a long, slow digestive process, to give the bugs time to do their work. I believe the point with this story (though admittedly the information is sparse) is that pandas have a bug in their guts that can carry out the process much more quickly and/or efficiently.
Now, we have a good reason to keep this animal species alive!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
There are parts of the world where seasons are less of an impact in plant growth, especially within the tropics.
The research paper was full of shit.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've been so desensitized by the internet that I assumed panda poo was a username.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
If you can convert cellulose to simple sugars, then brewer's yeast can convert that to ethanol without worrying about going blind from creating wood alcohol, methanol.
Of course, you'd want to be blind before reading the "Panda Poo Porter" on the label.
Many animals have segmented stomachs for extra bug time, and chew their cud to give it multiple chewings.
95% rate is pretty good.
Now they will be able to do to bamboo what they've done with corn. Make it too expensive to use for fuel, and too expensive to use as food.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
If pandas digest that lignocellulose ( there's another word for the spell checker), what is left in their poo? Really.
Best regards.
pandas have a carnivore's short digestive system so they spend the majority of the day eating. The gut bacteria make this just efficient enough for them to survive but its less efficient than a real herbivore's guts. But hey, it might be efficient enough for fuel production "However, the giant panda still has the digestive system of a carnivore, as well as carnivore-specific genes,[30] and thus derives little energy and little protein from consumption of bamboo. Its ability to digest cellulose is ascribed to the microbes in its gut.[31] The giant panda is a "highly specialized" animal with "unique adaptations", and has lived in bamboo forests for millions of years.[25] The average giant panda eats as much as 9 to 14 kg (20 to 30 pounds) of bamboo shoots a day. Because the giant panda consumes a diet low in nutrition, it is important for it to keep its digestive tract full.[22] The limited energy input imposed on it by its diet has affected the panda's behavior." - wikiepdia panda page
we have not been able to efficiently mimic this process
Mimic? Why mimic somehting that's already the way we want?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.