The Oyster’s Garter

Isn’t it nice when reality follows a TOG discussion on plastic bioremediation? A high school student in Canada may have isolated microbes that degrade plastic bags. As far as I can tell from the not-so-coherent news article, Daniel Burd created a bacteria-friendly environment (warm, wet, and nutritious) and seeded it with ground-up plastic bags. He then isolated plastic-eating strains and cultured them together with plastic. The most successful strain reduced the plastic’s mass by 32%.

Of course (assuming Burd’s results are reproducible), there is a ways to go before we can have giant vats of plastic-munching bacteria. Bacteria that can easily be grown in small, liter-sized cultures are often difficult to grow on industrial scales, and some bacteria can produce nasty byproducts (like methyl iodide, a greenhouse gas). It’s impossible to assess Burd’s results based on a news article - maybe he’ll continue his hot streak and publish in peer-reviewed journal. Still, plastic eating bacteria! From a high school student! Very promising, indeed.

Thanks to Sam for the link.

I’m pretty sure G.I. Joe had one of these, but no one in real life. Way to go Yves Rossy !

Raise your hand if you want one! [Raises hand] The clip mentions that inventor Rossy plans on using his flying wing to cross the English Channel, and no doubt he has other such stunts in mind, but there’s no discussion of putting these things into mass production. All he needs is some kind of slingshot takeoff mechanism and we’re on our way to flying cars. Well, that and some kind of environmentally sound jet fuel. Maybe the algae people will get that going soon.

Before Miriam posted her most excellent explanation of what the North Pacific Trash Gyre really looks like, I had a vision for how to clean it up: A multinational fleet of mighty ships, their prows split wide open to admit the polluted sea water, slurping it up into giant filters to pick up the plastic, and spitting out clean ocean out the back. I can see them trawling back and forth over the ocean until, eventually, some bearded guy in a yellow rain slicker and a sou’wester wipes his brow, turns to his first mate and says, “Ayuh, we finished cleanin’ the watah.” And then Miriam posted, and I learned just how difficult cleaning up a Texas-sized ocean of trash with plastic at multiple depths really would be. Alas.

So how do we fix it? Over at Blogfish, Mark Powell lined up three proposed solutions: more recycling of plastic, ban the worst products, or a massive reorganization of our economy. In the comments, someone proposes plankton trawls, which is pretty close to my vision big ocean filtering boats. Unfortunately, there are serious problems with all of these ideas: banning the worst plastics might reduce the growth of the trash heap, but it won’t exactly clean up the mess itself. Same problem with recycling. I’m still keen on the trawl/ocean sucking barge idea, but there is that pesky problem of bycatch, in that you’d filter out any fish or plankton living in a marine area larger than Texas.

But then I recalled something about microbes that eat oil, when we have massive oil spills. Well, heck, plastic is made of hydrocarbons, right? Maybe there’s something that can eat plastic.

And thus I enter the fabulous world of bioremediation, the notion that we can fix biological problems with other bits of biology, most commonly by using bacteria to turn something toxic or polluting into something non-toxic or non-polluting. Back in 2005, Spanish scientists studied microbes that ate oil after a major spill off the Spanish coast. And recently some University College Dublin scientists evolved a bacteria to eat polystyrene, the main ingredient in styrofoam.

Now there’s companies that specialize in this stuff. A clean-up company called Ecochem claims you can use micorbes to clean up everything from the MTBE added to gasoline to fuel and oil spills that have seeped into the earth. I also found a fungus that eats certain hard-to-recylce plastic resins that get used in particle board and cars. So that seems promising, but I’m not sure fungus will do all that well in the water.

So, I’m afraid my search came up short, which isn’t too surprising, because if there was a plastic-eating microbe out there, we probably would have already set it to work on our landfills, let alone the gyre. Still, I have to think that if bacteria eat oil and styrofoam, then we can’t be too far off from finding one that will help us along with our plastics clean up. In the meantime, maybe those giant trawlers aren’t such a terrible idea?

Imagine it: Paintable solar panels! Not yet, of course, but scientists at several universities have discovered ways to put chemicals into paint that would generate electricity. The theory is simple: paint fades with sunlight, right? Therefore, the paint is already reacting to the sunlight in some way. The trick then is to use the energy getting dumped into the paint and convert it into electricity.

Here are a couple of companies and scientists with more specific applications:

* Nanosolar, in sunny California, has devised a kind of film that can be applied directly to steel. They’re not profitable yet, but they began commercial production in November.

• Scientists at the University of Swansea, in jolly old England, have invented a kind of paste that can be rolled onto steel panels of the sort that’s often used for bridges, and similar to aluminum siding. They think they’re 2.5 years away from mass production.

• Our friends to the north, or in my case to the north east, at the University of Toronto, has devised a way to capture specific wavelengths of light using “quantum dots”. I’m not certain of the technology here, but Ted Sargent, the primary investigator, thinks he can tune his dots so they capture specific wavelengths of light, including the infrared spectrum, a part of the suns energy that no solar cells currently capture. He thinks he can put the dots into paint that we could spray on to any surface. He’s a good decade away from production, but I can already envision great, electricity generating murals painted onto the sides of buildings.

My question that remains unanswered for all of these, though, is I’m not clear how the engineers actually extract the charged up electrons from the paint. Do you just attach some copper wire to it or something? Any engineers out there have a guess?

[Via Treehugger, and thanks to inhabitat for the picture.]

Raise your hand if despite the “wireless” world we live in, your house is littered with cables. C’mon, I know I’m not the only one, fess up. Miriam’s and my apartment has cables everywhere, whether they run to the fan or the speakers, or they form a terrifying mass near the lone desktop. I’ve often wished for wireless electricity, but you know, I was always convinced it would create massive fields of invisible electrical death.

An MIT professor, Marin Soljačić, has devised a way to make wireless electricity, only without the death. He uses the principle of magnetic resonance.

A classic example is a set of wine glasses, each filled to a different level so that it vibrates at a different sound frequency. If a singer hits a pitch that matches the frequency of one glass, the glass might absorb so much acoustic energy that it will shatter; the other glasses remain unaffected.

He uses the same principle for electricity.

He took two copper coils and hung them about six feet apart. He plugged one coil into a wall outlet. then he attached a 60W lightbulb to the second coil. Since the two coils were “tuned” the same (I’m not certain how one tunes a coil) the light bulb lit up.

The application here would be to walk into your house and have your electronics charge automatically - iPod, cell phone, laptop whatever. No more low-battery beeps. No more losing a call to low battery power! No more tripping over the extension cord to the fan, pulling down the fan onto a startled cat causing it to yowl at 2 a.m.! Or is that last one just me?

UPDATE: I’m adding this because Sam asks such an excellent question in the comments below. I’m thinking it will be bad for your electric bill. It’s not clear form my googling whether the transmission coil will be on all the time or not, though I expect you can fix that by turning it on when you come home or something. But the article does mention a 70% efficiency rate, which means you’re losing 30% of your electricity via the transmission over the air. So electric bills will certainly be higher for wireless luxury (though not 30% higher unless you power everything in your house wirelessly).

In the future, your plastic drink bottles and plastic computer cases could be made out of smokestack emissions. At least, that’s what Science Daily says about news from the American Chemical Society meeting. Chemists are very excited about using carbon dioxide emissions as a raw material for making polycarbonate plastic. One of the authors of the report, Thomas Muller, said, “Using CO₂ to create polycarbonates might not solve the total carbon dioxide problem, but it could be a significant contribution.”

It’s tempting to snort “Oh, great, MORE cheap plastic crap.” In fact, as I was writing this, there was significant cynical snortage. But a solution that a) makes it economically desirable to reduce the amount of emissions going into the atmosphere; and b) turns something harmful into something useful is a good solution in my book. It’s not the Magical Fix-Everything Plan that puts a unicorn in every pot - obviously, as the state of the North Pacific Gyre demonstrates, we’ve got to get a lot better about reusing and recycling the plastic that we’ve already got. But wouldn’t it be neat to have a DVD made out of smoke?

Jaimie Mantzel is building a giant riding-robot. I really can’t do better than SI Rosenbaum’s (my friend from college!) excellent lede:

You’re living in the Vermont woods in a four-story dome you built yourself. Well, the third floor is really a trampoline. You’re not sure if that counts as a floor.

So you’re living in your dome, working on all your little robots — the one like a slug, and the one like a turtle, the one that swims and the one that climbs walls — and you decide it would be cool to have a giant robot, big enough to ride around in.

And because you’re Jaimie Mantzel, you know right away you can build it.

More info & videos of his giant robot progress on Mantzel’s webpage. His smaller robots, from slugs to spiders, are also awesome. And I admit to some dome envy - after all, his third floor is a trampoline.

If you still haven’t had enough robots, consider entering the Scifi Channel’s “Make A Cylon” contest. It will be judged by Number 6 and Boomer/Athena - played in real life by Tricia Helfer and Grace Park. Entries can be either classic toasters or “OMG! They look like us!” newer models.

Seriously, you can’t convince me the U.S. Military isn’t really consulting SciFi authors. This 1998 document emerged from a 2006 Freedom of Information Act request. It’s a summary of the Army’s attempts to develop non-lethal weapons using microwave and other electro-magnetic radiation.  Here’s a list of what the army came up with, and what it would do to an imaginary enemy soldier I’ve decided to name Gil (also, the Army has lame names for their weapons, so I made up better ones. Just so you know).

Heat-o-matic

What it does: Gives Gil heat stroke by aiming a microwave at him.

Why it might work: As anyone with a modern kitchen knows, things exposed to high concentrations of microwaves get hotter. In this case, the idea is to make get Gil’s core body temperature rise  to 41 degrees C (Normal is 37, for all of us non-metric folks). That will essentially give him heat stroke. We know it might work because we have lots of experience with microwaves, and “numerous studies have been performed on animals.” (Now we know what games these scientists played as children, don’t we?).

Why it didn’t: Subject has to remain in the beam for 15-30 minutes: “OK, Gil, I’m going to incapacitate you now. Just, don’t move.”

The Vociferator

What it does: Makes it so you can speak into a microphone and beam your voice “hundreds of meters” to someone’s ear. Apparently only the person you aim at will hear it. They put a microphone next to a test subject, and the subject heard a voice counting one through ten, but the microphone caught nothing. That’s pretty nifty if you ask me.
Why it might work:  Small bursts of microwave fired at someone’s ear will cause the air to expand against the eardrum, much like normal sound. Microwave radiation is already one of the more common causes for very brief audio hallucinations.

Why it didn’t: Aim has to be very precise. You’d hate to aim a message at American hostage Sarah, telling her to duck, because the Heat-o-matic was about to fire, only to hit Gil with the message by mistake and give away the plan. Still, this one seems pretty cool. The army should get it back on track.
Epilepsinator

What it does: Shoots pulses of microwave radiation into Gil’s brain causing him to have an epileptic seizures.

Why it might work: Because a very specific pattern of flashing lights in a Japanese cartoon (Pokemon) once induced seizures in thousands of school children. The military thinks it would be reasonable to imagine you could do the same thing with electromagnetic rays. Sent on the frequency level of Alpha brain waves, the beams cause neurons to fire in an uncoordinated manner, causing seizures.

Why it won’t work: Again, it’s hard to aim. Also, to induce seizures in just Gil is relatively easy, but to do it to Gil’s whole regiment would require a lot of power.

Accousticator

What it does: Play very loud, low pitched noise to make Gil dizzy and nauseous.

Why it might work: Apparently noise at the right frequency and volume will actually push some of the ear organs  into the side of the aural canal, which then throws off all the balance mechanisms of the inner ear. This will make Gil dizzy, nauseous, and possibly cause rapid eye movement.

Why it doesn’t work: Because it sounds like something Cobra Commander might invent. And also, because it requires a lot of energy to make this much noise, so it’s not very portable, not to mention it would thwarted by a  set of 99-cent ear plugs.

Laser gun

What it does: Shoot frickin’ lasers

Why it might work: A laser in the eye can make Gil go blind. Didn’t your parents teach you anything?

Why it doesn’t: A bullet in the eye also makes Gil blind, and it’s cheaper.

What to do with plastic trash? Clearly, make it into formalwear.

This ballgown was made by sewing together 12″ squares of the clear blue plastic backing from Plexiglass. The corset was made with mustard packets.

Personally, I fear that mustard packets won’t give enough support. I want my recycled corset to be made out of nuclear warheads. Or at least recycled guns with full  functionality.

More photos of the plastic gown here.

Boy, I’m sure glad that I live in 2008! I can ride in my 300 MPH automatic car to my climate-controlled dome city, where private cars are banned in favor of mass transportation. After I’m home from my four-hour workday, I can get my housewife to determine her meals for the week, and the robot will do all the defrosting.

Oh, wait. I’m supposed to BE the housewife. Silly 1968! Imagining superfast cars and massive domes is easy, but imagining a female reader of 1968 Mechanix Illustrated is apparently inconceivable.

To be fair, the author was dead-on about a lot of things, from the rise of computers to the populations of the US. But screw credit cards (also predicted in the article), I want the four-hour workday! And possibly a flying car. And a spaceport with rocketships. And a silver rocket pack!

Via Boing Boing