Fungus Genome May Be The Key To Cellulosic Ethanol

So:

By decoding the genome of a green fungus with a hunger for fibrous plants, scientists hope to boost the supply of cellulose-based ethanol, leaving more food for consumption and driving down transportation costs.

By way of background:

The high cost of cellulose-based ethanol comes from the expensive enzymes, derived from the fungus Tricoderma reesei, which are used to break down trees, corn stalks, paper, and other wood or pulp-based items.

For years, scientists have tried to economically produce enough enzymes to break cellulose down into simple sugars that can then be fermented into ethanol, but to no avail.

Having the genome of T. reesei "gives you a tool kit with all the tools, where before you were trying to blindly match things up," said Jason Stajich, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley,

[Via Discovery News]

Itchy The Killer

Atul Gawande's latest article in the New Yorker sounds like an awesome horror story. Phantom limbs, the nervous system and the science of pyschotic, compulsive and self-mutilating itching:

For M., the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, "this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid." She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.'s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night--and all the way into her brain.

WoooOOOOOaaaaahhhh!

[via Jonah Lehrer, a bastard who isn't linking to the New Yorker article]

Beet Pulp For Pet Food To Be Used For Bioplastics Instead

This Dog Says, "No Way."



Despite healthy suspicions that we in the developed world are robbing global food resources for the manufacture of "sustainable" bioplastics and biofuels, our research communities soldier on.

Chemists Victoria Finkenstadt and LinShu Liu of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service have been working since 2004 on a method for transforming beet pulp into what Science Daily describes as a "specialized filler material for polylactic-acid-based plastics [PLA]"—and they seem to have had a breakthrough.

Unfortunately, the beet pulp, which is traditionally only marketable as a component in livestock feed or pet food, would be going to make exactly the bioplastic that releases methane (a potent greenhouse gas) while rotting in landfills, according to this report in the London Guardian. The PLA-based plastic containers further don't appear to decompose quite the way people expect them to in that, to fully biodegrade (a primary benefit they have over traditional petrol plastics), they have to be composted in anaerobic digesters of which there are precious few (in Britain) and which traditionally don't accept plastic containers.

SO: Without a better alternative (going back to regular plastics isn't exactly productive), maybe just getting more municipal anaerobic digesters is the solution. (How expensive are they, anyway?) With the beat pulp filler lowering the cost of PLA-based bioplastics, maybe it's worth still considering these. I feel slightly inhuman asking this, but why are we blaming food shortages on biofuels and bioplastics, when climate change-induced drought and exponentially increasing population growth deserve their fair share of the blame? This goes out to our domesticated pet populations too: Don't hate the bioplastic, dog. Hate the game.

[Link to the Science Daily article; Proposal for the USDA's research project "Valuable Polysaccharide-Based Products from Sugar Beet Pulp and Citrus Peel"]

Things That Make Real Life Seem Like Anime: Microscopic Bugs Next to Microscopic Gears

This super creepy photo is of a less-than-1-mm-long mite on a Microelectromechanical system (MEMS). According to Wikipedia:

MEMS is the technology of the very small, and merges at the nano-scale into nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) and nanotechnology. MEMS are also referred to as micromachines (in Japan), or Micro Systems Technology - MST (in Europe) [...] At these size scales, the standard constructs of classical physics do not always hold true. Due to MEMS' large surface area to volume ratio, surface effects such as electrostatics and wetting dominate volume effects such as inertia or thermal mass.

To quote Sam Jackson in JP1, "Hold onto your butts."