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Researchers from the University of Florida have discovered certain bacteria on the ocean floor could neutralize massive quantities of industrial carbon dioxide.
Because carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activity, is a key culprit in climate change, scientists from a variety of disciplines have been searching for ways to effectively capture and neutralize the gas.
The UF researchers discovered that an enzyme produced by the bacteria Thiomicrospira crunogena, can convert the harmful gas into a benign compound. The enzyme carbonic anhydrase can actually strip carbon dioxide from organisms, the researchers say.
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Could Deep-sea Bacteria Be the Latest Weapon Against Climate Change?
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Could I have a drug overdose?
(Score: 3, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday October 26 2015, @02:21PM
Had to click a link [ufl.edu] from TFA to get the answer.
The chemistry of sequestering works this way: The enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, catalyzes a chemical reaction between carbon dioxide and water. The carbon dioxide interacts with the enzyme, converting the greenhouse gas into bicarbonate. The bicarbonate can then be further processed into products such as baking soda and chalk.
(Score: 5, Informative) by deimtee on Monday October 26 2015, @03:16PM
bicarbonate is a negative ion. You need to balance it with a cation - typically sodium or calcium. (baking soda and chalk respectively)
These are not found uncombined in nature, and the most likely source is from the sea.
Sequestering calcium or sodium bicarbonate is going to leave behind chloride ions, most likely as hydrochloric acid.
So what they are proposing is acidifying the ocean. Isn't that already a problem?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2015, @05:21PM
Now you've done the job of submitter and editor. See, if you gonna submit a link, a science story link, you should at least read it and grok the basic, and put the gist in the summary. This kind of posts put up summaries completely devoid of any substance - here only thing it has are some buzzwords climate change, CO2, bacteria enzyme. Nothing in it encourages people to read the linked article or even post comments other than bitching how the post is crap.
(Score: 5, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday October 26 2015, @11:58PM
Hey now, Phoenix is the number one story contributor to this site. It was just a little while back when the entire submission queue was nothing but Phoenix. I've done a few submissions where I hope I dug into the details, but that is a lot of work, even to determine if you've got something worth submitting, easily an hour or two. The comments section is where we can elaborate on TFS, which is all I did. Phoenix did the work of finding the story and grepping the part that would be relevant to Soylentils.
If I had infinite time on my hands, I would love to pause time for a few hours after I got home, submit two or three researched stories, then unpause. It's kind of fun to play amateur blogger, but lately I've been too stressed by work and other things happening in the personal life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @01:39AM
Credit is due to phoenix, yet the criticism remains on his submission on science. He seemed to do better on social stuff.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 28 2015, @01:32PM
The trouble with summarizing articles in which you are not a subject matter expert (an expert on deep-sea bacteria living near thermal vents, in this case. I am not one. Are you?), is that when you attempt to summarize an article about, say, hurculators, you invite the inevitable, "Hurculators aren't synchronized at 3000 gigazatz! Every geek worth his salt should know hurculators can't be synchronized above 2500 gigazatz without borking the hamilizer! Can't we get any REAL editors on this site? Soylent is teh suck..."
Those comments are a punch in the gut to the volunteers who build this site, and who edit and submit stories for this community.
To get the 100% perfect summaries and editing you're talking about would require armies of volunteer marine biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, mechanical engineers, materials scientists, and every other field and subfield out there and have them adept at boiling down their very specialized findings into terms that you, a programmer, say, can understand. We don't have that (yet) at SN, so instead we have to go with schmucks like me who find the premises of articles interesting to submit them, and let their virtues and value be hashed out in the comments by readers who might be more knowledgeable and able to shed more light on the news.
I thought the premise of using bacteria to sequester CO2 was interesting, so I submitted it. In the words of Douglas Adams, "We apologize for the inconvenience..."
Washington DC delenda est.