Researchers have discovered new strains of Pseudomonas bacteria that feed on the PET plastic used in drink bottles, and turn it into a more valuable, biodegradable form of plastic. The discovery suggests a way to keep billions of pounds of discarded plastic out of landfills; a 2006 study [pdf] found that less than 25 percent of PET plastic is currently recycled because the industry doesn’t have enough use for the end product.
Getting high-quality material — such as plastics suitable for packaging food or beverages —- back out of recycled plastic is more expensive than making virgin PET, so most plastic bottles are recycled into lower-grade, and less valuable, plastic. But there’s only so much demand for lower-grade plastics, says microbiologist and coauthor Kevin O’ Connor…. “The problem is that the market [for recycled PET] is saturated” [Science News].
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At an international conference in November, a group of ambitious engineers and would-be astronauts will draw up a proposal and a timeline for building the world’s first space elevator, which would give humans access to orbit via 22,000-mile-long cables. The Japan Space Elevator Association [Web site in Japanese] estimates the project’s cost at $9 billion, but according to the association’s officials, the elevator would be a bargain at that price.
A space elevator could carry people, huge solar-powered generators or even casks of radioactive waste. The point is that breaking free of Earth’s gravity will no longer require so much energy — perhaps 100 times less than launching the space shuttle. “Just like travelling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space,” Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, said [The Times].
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Many years after he revolutionized the field of physics, Albert Einstein took up a new task: inventing a better refrigerator. The 1930 appliance that he patented in partnership with a former student, Leo Szilard, had no moving parts and required no electricity, but was quickly forgotten as more efficient refrigeration technology was invented. Now, an electrical engineer has built a prototype of the forgotten Einstein fridge as part of a three-year project to develop more robust appliances that can be used in places without electricity [The Guardian].
Einstein and Szilard were reportedly spurred to inventive action by a news report of a Berlin family that died when toxic gas leaked from their refrigerator; the two physicists decided to create a system without moving parts to reduce the likelihood of accidents.
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Researchers have found the first small finger-like bones in the fins of a fish that lived 380 million years ago, about 15 million years before the first four-footed creatures, called tetrapods, clambered onto the land.
The finding upends the most recent theory of the evolution of digits: The need to adapt to swampy marshlands and terra firma, the theory went, is what drove the gradual shift through natural selection from fish fins suitable only for swimming to weight-bearing limbs with articulated joints. The study, however, reveals that rudimentary fingers were already present inside the fins of the shallow-water Panderichthys, a transitional species that was nonetheless more fish than tetrapod [The Daily Telegraph].
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Google and General Electric have announced a partnership aimed at upgrading the United States electric power grid and pushing forward the development of renewable energy. The companies plan to conduct a joint lobbying effort in Washington to encourage the government to invest in developing a “smart grid,” and will also work together on projects like geothermal energy systems and integrating plug-in electric cars into the grid. The deal combines each company’s strengths: GE will make the hardware — from wind turbines to metering switches, and Google will make the software — applying network technologies to the grid [Portfolio].
The announcement follows a speech given two weeks ago by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in which he laid out a blueprint for how the United States could switch over to generating 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030, while also eliminating half of the gasoline-powered cars from the roads. While Google hasn’t offered to follow through on that comprehensive proposal, which carried the hefty price tag of $2.7 billion, the partnership with GE seems to indicate that Google wants to put many of its suggestions into practice.
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The vaunted Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experienced a significant setback this morning, when temperatures in one sector of the particle collider began to rise, and a ton of liquid helium escaped into one area of the collider’s 17-mile tunnel. The mishap follows a previous glitch that occurred one day after the LHC’s opening and delayed operations for about a week, but this new incident appears to be more serious and could take several weeks to resolve.
The LHC smashes subatomic particles together by send protons whizzing through its circular tunnel to collide at certain points; the beams of protons are kept on track by over 1,600 massive magnets that must be kept at temperature near zero on the Kelvin scale. The incident was what is known as a “quench”, in which the temperature of superconducting magnets that are normally chilled to 1.9C above absolute zero started to rise. It caused the temperature of many of the 200 or so magnets in the affected sector to soar by as much as 100C, which would normally take about two weeks to be cooled again [The Times]. The LHC’s operating organization, known as CERN, hasn’t yet revealed the cause of the incident.
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The European Space Agency (ESA) is considering a space mission called Marco Polo, in which a spacecraft would land on a small asteroid, drill into its surface to collect samples of rock and dust, and then fly back to Earth where it would drop its sample capsule down to the surface. Two satellite manufacturing companies are currently conducting a feasibility study; if ESA signs off on the proposal, Marco Polo could sail off into space in 2017.
Asteroids are chunks of debris left over from the chaotic mass that spun around the young Sun during the formation of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago. The rest of the material coalesced into planets [The Daily Mail]. Researchers say that studying the composition of an asteroid could give them insight into how the solar system formed. The roughly $430 million mission would also serve as a warm-up for a hypothetical round-trip journey to Mars, as it would enable the development of technology needed for getting up and down from a large planetary body with a much bigger gravitational pull [Telegraph].
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The introduction of genetically engineered cotton plants has had an unexpectedly broad effect on Chinese agriculture, according to a new study. The so-called Bt cotton plants that produce a chemical that kills the cotton bollworm have not only reduced the incidence of the pest in cotton fields, but also in neighboring fields of corn, soybeans, and other crops. The study, published in the journal Science [subscription required], found that the altered cotton plants kill the bollworm larvae before they can mature and move on to other crops.
The cotton bollworm, Helicoverpa armigera, is one of the most serious insect pests in Asia, attacking wheat, corn, soya beans, peanuts and vegetables as well as cotton. In the early 1990s, repeated bollworm outbreaks in China were barely contained. The heavy pesticide use that controlled them killed thousands of people each year, according to [biotechnology researcher] Huang Dafang [Nature News], as many farmers didn’t wear protective gear while they drenched their crops with chemicals.
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Just beyond the Milky Way, astronomers have found an extremely dim dwarf galaxy that appears to have just a few hundred stars, but is surprisingly massive. Researchers say the galaxy, called Segue 1, must be packed with mysterious dark matter in order to give it such bulk.
Dark matter has never been directly detected, and its presence can only be deduced: Although dark matter doesn’t emit or absorb light, scientists can measure its gravitational effect on ordinary matter and believe it makes up about 85 percent of the total mass in the universe. Dark matter is thought to play a crucial role in galaxy formation, perhaps by contributing to the clumps that stimulate star formation in a budding galaxy and by contributing to the overall matter of a galaxy that allows it to lure other matter and galaxies inward in a growth-by-merger process [SPACE.com].
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Researchers may have found a away to avert the doom many predict for commercial fisheries around the world. A system in which individuals are apportioned a fixed share of each year’s catch shows great promise in averting the collapse of fish stocks, according to a new study, in contrast to traditional “open access” rules in which fishermen compete to bring in the biggest load. “Under open access, you have a free-for-all race to fish, which ultimately leads to collapse,” said [lead researcher] Christopher Costello…. “But when you allocate shares of the catch, then there is an incentive to protect the stock, which reduces collapse. We saw this across the globe” [Reuters].
The results are a rare bit of good news in the debate over what’s to be done about the world’s fisheries; in a previous study, researchers predicted that if overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction continue unabated, all of the world’s fisheries would collapse by 2048. A fishery is considered collapsed if catches fall to 10% of historic highs [Los Angeles Times].
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The Food and Drug Administration proposed rules today to regulate genetically engineered animals that are raised for food or to produce medications. The agency would use its existing authority over animal drugs to regulate genetic engineering, the addition of genes to animals to improve food quality, build disease resistance or produce medicines for humans, the FDA said in a statement. Producers would have to demonstrate that altered animals, if intended for use as food, are safe to eat [Bloomberg].
The step is being viewed as yet another official vote of confidence in the safety of genetically engineered food products. Genetic engineering is already widely used in plants in the United States, where several government agencies oversee its use in agriculture. Crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans have been altered to be more resistant to pests or to endure high doses of weed-killers (like Monsanto’s blockbuster Roundup Ready crops). The FDA has previously said that cloned animals and their offspring are safe to eat and don’t require regulation, although squeamish consumers may put a damper on that market. It remains to be seen if consumers will accept genetically engineered steak and eggs.
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Researchers have found that a one-year temperature spike can decrease the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by a grassland ecosystem for up to two years. The four-year experiment, conducted at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada, adds a troubling new factor to calculations on how to best cope with global warming. Grasslands and their soils are considered a major sink for excess atmospheric carbon dioxide. Such natural carbon sponges, if they continue to thrive, could help alleviate the warming effects of manmade CO2 emissions [Science News].
In the experiment, which was described in the journal Nature [subscription required], researchers removed 12 large plots of grass with the underlying six feet of soil and microbes, each taken from the Oklahoma prairie in one piece. The plots were transported to the institute’s greenhouses, where the ecosystems were carefully controlled. Half the plots were exposed to normal fluctuations of temperature and rainfall, while the other half were subjected to one year where temperatures were consistently 7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than usual.
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A new government report issues a harsh critique of the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate the tons of toxic electronic waste that are discarded each year. U.S. authorities have yet to develop a national approach for handling the waste, which often contains toxic metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. Amounts are rapidly growing as consumers replace their laptops, cellphones and televisions [Washington Post].
These discarded devices often end up in slipshod recycling facilities in China, India, and Africa, the report says, where they both pollute the environment and threaten workers’ health. Jim Puckett, an activist with the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, which promotes responsible recycling, said he recently saw workers in Guiyu, China, burning wiring and using acid baths to extract usable ingredients. “It was a cyber-age horror show,” he said [San Jose Mercury News].
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A federal health agency has dropped plans for a controversial autism study, pleasing many scientists but disappointing some families with autistic children. The study would have tested a treatment called chelation, which removes heavy metals from the body and is used to treat lead poisoning. Its use as an autism treatment is based on the fringe theory that mercury in vaccines triggers autism — a theory never proved and rejected by mainstream science. Mercury hasn’t been in childhood vaccines since 2001, except for certain flu shots [AP].
The National Institute of Mental Health had previously said that if the study proved that chelation therapy had no effect, if would have finally dismissed the “anecdotal reports” that the treatment is effective. But safety concerns based on recent animal studies apparently deterred the institute from continuing with the study. “NIMH has decided that resources are better directed at this time to testing other potential therapies for autism spectrum disorders, and is not pursuing the additional review required to begin the study,” the institute said [Reuters].
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A “sustainable chemical” company called Genomatica has developed a way to use sugar and genetically engineered bacteria to produce a common industrial chemical that’s usually produced using petroleum, and which is found in everything from Spandex to car bumpers. By using sugar from sugar cane as a feedstock, industrial chemical companies can get a cheaper alternative to petroleum-derived chemicals, while investing in processes that are less polluting and nontoxic, said Genomatica CEO Chris Gann [CNET].
Genomatica produces the chemical, 1,4-butanediol (BDO), by feeding pure glucose derived from sugarcane to E. coli bacteria, which has been engineered to produce BDO. “We have engineered the organism such that it has to secrete that product in order for it to grow,” says [company president] Christophe Schilling…. “The interests of the organism are aligned with our interests: It grows faster when it produces more” [Scientific American].
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