[HN Gopher] Bacteria upcycle carbon waste into valuable chemicals
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       Bacteria upcycle carbon waste into valuable chemicals
        
       Author : gmays
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2022-02-22 19:34 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (news.northwestern.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (news.northwestern.edu)
        
       | candyman wrote:
       | Nothing matters unless and until it scales. There are scores of
       | these little examples of doing this sort of thing in a lab.
        
         | VBprogrammer wrote:
         | Surely the converse is true: nothing ever happened at scale
         | which didn't start off as a little example on a lab bench?
        
           | troymc wrote:
           | The vast majority of the living things on Earth didn't start
           | off on a lab bench, they just mutated and evolved "out
           | there," in nature.
           | 
           | Therefore the converse is not true.
        
             | countvonbalzac wrote:
             | Mutations don't happen at scale, they occur in single
             | organisms. Therefore the converse is true!
        
         | SantalBlush wrote:
         | And this is a useless, low-effort point to make. If we waited
         | for a technology to scale before posting about it on HN, it
         | would already be old news.
        
       | lkbm wrote:
       | The journal article:
       | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-01195-w
       | 
       | The valuable chemicals are acetone and isopropanol. (Not being
       | snarky--they are indeed of value so if we can make their
       | production an affordable carbon-negative process, that's pretty
       | nifty.)
        
         | hannob wrote:
         | The term "carbon negative" is getting overused a lot, and this
         | is one example...
         | 
         | The carbon is not removed permanently, it's stored in products
         | that will eventually end up in an incinerator causing CO2 (or
         | worse, on a landfill, where their degredation may cause even
         | more harmful greenhouse gases).
        
           | Denvercoder9 wrote:
           | Regardless of the nuances of what "carbon negative" exactly
           | means (and I agree it often gets misused), everytime we move
           | a process off of using coal/oil/gas and onto using carbon
           | that's already in the atmospheric cycle, that's a win in the
           | fight against climate change.
        
       | soperj wrote:
       | I wonder what the cost is compared to the current process? I also
       | wonder which chemicals they'll target next.
        
       | betwixthewires wrote:
       | First sentence in the article:
       | 
       | > Bacteria are known for breaking down lactose to make yogurt and
       | sugar to make beer.
       | 
       | Why do they do this? Yeast makes alcohol, not bacteria. The
       | people that research this stuff probably know this, so why do
       | they feel the need to dumb stuff down for readers? It is
       | frustrating.
        
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       (page generated 2022-02-22 23:00 UTC)