A 25 million dollar prize is open for an invention that can eat substantial amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. News at Nature.
"The winner must be able to demonstrate a commercially viable design which will result in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric, greenhouse gases each year for at least ten years without countervailing harmful effects," state the written rules of the competition. It must "contribute materially to the stability of the Earth's climate".The winning entry could be anything from manufacturing bacteria to install in industrial emissions pipes, to creating a system that buries CO2 underground, or even inventing artificial trees to breathe in the gas from the air.
I do hope no one would be so cynical as to invent a bacteria that eats all the carbon it can find. I am, of course, thinking of the fact that we are pretty much walking carbon candies for such bacteria.
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I'll enter my secret device in their contest as soon as I get it patented. The acronym is T.R.E.E.
open for an invention that can eat substantial amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. [...] I do hope no one would be so cynical as to invent a bacteria that eats all the carbon it can find. I am, of course, thinking of the fact that we are pretty much walking carbon candies for such bacteria.
I can hardly believe I could see something so confused posted anywhere in ScienceBlogs, and after we all just got through laughing at Gillian McKeith.
Carbon is an atom; you can't "eat" carbon, you can only turn the molecules it's a part of into other molecules (where "molecules" as a class includes the pure element, smarty pants at the back there).
The prize committee is looking for a device that will remove the oxide of carbon from the air. If that's a carbon-transforming bacterium, we're hardly going to be palatable to them, because that's not the chemical form our carbon atoms take. We won't look like their candy, we'll look like their excrement.
Creatures made of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide better watch out though.
derek, I don't suppose you've come across the phrase "tongue-in-cheek" before, have you?