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  • [Scientific American Instant Egghead]

  • (David Biello) Modern civilization is addicted to oil.

  • We burn up or otherwise consume some ninety million barrels of the goop

  • every day: that ends up making a mess.

  • According to the US Environmental Protection Agency,

  • there are an average of seventy spills everyday, mostly insignificant.

  • Every once in a while, we make a spectacular mess,

  • like the punctured Exxon-Valdez oil tanker, off the coast of Alaska,

  • or BP's blown-out Macondo well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

  • When humans make a big mess like that, humans try to clean it up.

  • We corral it with booms or burn it off.

  • But whatever we miss ends up getting eaten by microscopic bugs.

  • In fact, bacteria and other microbes are one of the main reasons

  • that BP's Gulf oil spill wasn't a bigger disaster.

  • A big bloom of bugs ate most to the 4.1 million barrels of oil spill,

  • before it could wash into Wetlands or tar sea creatures.

  • How big was the bloom? 100 sextillion microbial cells big.

  • Here's how they work.

  • Oil has been a part of life on Earth for eons

  • and microbes evolved to take advantage of that.

  • Tiny bacteria feast on the oil and gas seeping from the bottom of the sea floor,

  • or bubbling to the surface.

  • They are not necessarily fast, but they are thorough,

  • turning loose hydrocarbons into more microbial cells.

  • But microbes don't only eat oil.

  • Plastics, often made from oil, get everywhere too:

  • for example the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

  • is made up of tiny grains of plastic and the occasional grocery bag.

  • it's actually proved to be hospitable home for plastick-eating microbes

  • and other microscopic life.

  • This new ecosystem has been dubbed the plastisphere.

  • On their own microbes would probably take eons to clean up our plastic mess,

  • but with synthetic biology, we could tweak these little friends

  • and help speed up that process.

  • We could help them to help us.

  • Scientists have been working on souping up microbes' ability to eat oil for decades.

  • The very first genetically modified organism to be patented

  • was an oil-eating microbe, way back in 1980.

  • There's no reason the plastic eaters couldn't be enhanced in the same way.

  • It's obviously better to avoid trashing plastic and dumping oil in the first place,

  • but since we're a messy bunch it's a good thing we have microbes around

  • to help us clean up.

  • For Scientific American's Instant Egg, I'm David Biello.

  • (music)

  • [Subscribe! Written & presented by David Biello - Edited by Joss Fong - Produced by Eric R. Olson]

  • [Other credits and further written info]

[Scientific American Instant Egghead]

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Can Microbes Clean Up Our Oily Mess? - Instant Egghead #58

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    joey joey に公開 2021 年 05 月 16 日
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