utenzi

Let's see, according to Reuters: President George W. Bush is very concerned about global food shortages and has asked senior aides to look into how the United States can help alleviate the problem, the White House said on Monday. Top finance and development officials from around the world called on Sunday for urgent action to stem rising food prices, warning that social unrest would spread unless the cost of basic staples was contained. Maybe if we weren't growing crops just to put them into our gas tanks, that would increase the amount of corn available--and drop the price thereof. Just a thought. Especially since corn is one of the most subsidized and petroleum intensive of crops.

I saw an interesting press release from UM today. According to it: University of Maryland research that started with bacteria from the Chesapeake Bay has led to a process that may be able to convert large volumes of all kinds of plant products, from leftover brewer's mash to paper trash, into ethanol and other biofuel alternatives to gasoline. That's pretty exciting since, if commercially viable, it'll allow "cheap" plant materials to be used to produce ethanol. Using corn, as we do now, is silly since the energy you get out isn't much higher than what you put in to grow and process the corn. And then there's the really annoying side effect of raising prices to consumers on corn and all downstream products (farmland, cows, meat, soda, popcorn, and on and on and on---everything uses corn!). Making ethanol from switchgrass won't cause these economic difficulties. That process of making ethanol from cellulose was developed by University of Maryland profes

The following post was derived from the University of Rochester (NY) website for press releases . You might ask why I think it might be of interest to you--and if you do, my answer is that ethanol is the wave of the future. Not because it's a good idea, but because the government in all its glory and wisdom is backing this energy play. Already ethanol production is having strong effects on the price of corn and it's only going to get worse--the research detailed here might change all that by allowing ethanol production to be shifted to waste biomass like sugar cane pulp and grass. Researchers at the University of Rochester have identified how genes responsible for biomass breakdown are turned on in a microorganism that produces valuable ethanol from materials like grass and cornstalks. This is very important since most ethanol is now produced from corn which isn't very efficient and also drives up the price of corn--and any animal or food "made" from corn. On th

The title of this post is actually referring to my post yesterday. If you put yeast in a mild sugar solution, say grape juice, they'll use that sugar to create their waste product, ethanol. You see, many organisms that live in liquids have evolved with the assumption that their wastes will dilute out to the point where they won't hurt them. Yeast and ethanol is one example, certain types of bacteria and acetic acid is another example. In the "wild" these organisms have no difficulty doing their thing--but pesky humans enclose the yeast or bacteria in limited spaces and those waste products build up. We do this because we don't have any interest in the bacteria or yeast--it's the waste products that we really want. Sounds kinda gross, huh? Wine and vinegar are created when the microorganisms create so much waste that they kill themselves--at which point humans bottle the resulting liquids and then sell them. Now you might see how I'm making an analogy here