Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O’Driscoll in SCI’s Chemistry & Industry magazine published today.
Obviously this is the chemical, not the fruit…
And I have to assume that the scientists know better than I do what the reactions and results will be…
But I can’t help wondering what exactly the ramifications will be. I mean, do we know if the lime will have any side-affects? What kind of consequences could there be? Reducing greenhouse gasses sounds great…but not if it kills off everything in the ocean.
Most people are aware of the recent articles contending that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might destroy the world. While most scientists have no such concerns, a recent preprint released to arxiv systematically dismantles the notion. The gist of the argument is this: Everything that will be created at the LHC is already being created by cosmic rays. If a black hole created by the LHC is interactive enough to destroy the world within the lifetime of the sun, similar black holes are already being created by cosmic rays. Such black holes would be stopped by dense cosmic objects (neutron stars and white dwarfs). A black hole stopped in one of these objects would eventually absorb it. We see sufficiently old neutron stars in the sky, thus any black hole that could be created at the LHC, even if it is stable, would have no effect on the earth on any meaningful timescale.
Well, that’s reassuring, I guess…
I can’t say I ever really took the possibility of obliteration seriously… I mean, with a project this big you’d think the subject came up at least once during planning, and was probably dismissed since they went ahead and built it anyway. I’d like to think that if anyone really thought it’d destroy the world that they wouldn’t have built it.
Still, it was fun speculation… It isn’t often that you read a story about the kind of crazy science toy that could have featured prominantly in a Bond movie.
A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.
Alright… So they didn’t sprout legs and crawl out of their petri dish… But it’s still a pretty impressive step. The article explains that a population of E. Coli developed the ability to metabolize citrate, one of the substances in their culture medium that E. Coli cannot normally use.
This may not sound like much… But the ability to metabolize citrate is one of the key differences that scientists use to distinguish E. Coli from other species. So, as far as bacteria are concerned, this is a pretty major step.
The banana we eat today is not the one your grandparents ate. That one — known as the Gros Michel — was, by all accounts, bigger, tastier, and hardier than the variety we know and love, which is called the Cavendish. The unavailability of the Gros Michel is easily explained: it is virtually extinct. Introduced to our hemisphere in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel was almost immediately hit by a blight that wiped it out by 1960. The Cavendish was adopted at the last minute by the big banana companies — Chiquita and Dole — because it was resistant to that blight, a fungus known as Panama disease… [Now] Panama disease — or Fusarium wilt of banana — is back, and the Cavendish does not appear to be safe from this new strain, which appeared two decades ago in Malaysia, spread slowly at first, but is now moving at a geometrically quicker pace. There is no cure, and nearly every banana scientist says that though Panama disease has yet to hit the banana crops of Latin America, which feed our hemisphere, the question is not if this will happen, but when. Even worse, the malady has the potential to spread to dozens of other banana varieties, including African bananas, the primary source of nutrition for millions…
I know I’ve mentioned before that the bananas we eat today are not the same ones that were available a few years back… And I know I’ve mentioned that they’re all basically clones… And usually, while I’m on the subject, I’ll say something about the dangers of developing a monoculture.
Well, here we can see a very good illustration of one of those dangers in action. Panama Disease, the critter that killed off the old Gros Michel variety of bananas, is back for more - and this time around it looks like Cavendish is on the menu. And because the Cavendish variety is also just a bunch of clones they’re all going to be equally susceptible to Panama Disease. There’s no individual variation. One field isn’t going to be any more or less resistant to the disease than any other.
The article also mentions how important bananas are in some other places in the world and theorizes that if the blight reaches African bananas it could hugely impact the food supply there. Which, I suppose, is true… But African bananas aren’t all Cavendish bananas. There are quite a few different varieties… So if one gets wiped out there are others that may very well be resistant. And since they aren’t all clones there is the possibility that some of them may be more resistant to the disease.
“In what has to be an embarrasment for the U.S. Department of Energy, an anonymous donor has ponied up $5 million to keep the country’s only remaining particle physics laboratory operating efficiently.”
Fermilab is the last remaining particle physics laboratory here in the U.S. It does all sorts of crazy-advanced science stuff with particle accelerators and neutrinos and whatnot. And it is apparently not important enough to get the funding it needs to keep operating.
This is from the nation that managed to put a man on the moon and develop a nuclear weapon. The nation that created the Internet. Science and technology used to be hugely important here in America. These days we can’t even scrape together enough funding to keep Fermilab open.
These days we’re debating the merits of Intelligent Design and pumping billions of dollars into Iraq - while the rest of the world marches along and leaves us to founder in our own dark age.
ramifications?
