Tag: biotechnology

Fuel from germs

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/01/Fuel-from-Germs.mp3[/podcast] For years, we’ve been turning crops such as corn, wheat and sugar beets into fuel, using yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. But there’s an obvious problem with this. That stuff we’re turning into fuel is also food for humans and feed for animals. (And as an aside, how come we always call it …

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Liquid fuel from solar power

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Liquid-Fuels-from-Solar-Power.mp3[/podcast] In recent years, scientists and engineers have turned to biofuels—fuels generated from living things, and hence renewable—as a means of weaning us off of fossil fuels in favor of something cleaner, less likely to run out, and less wrapped up in international geopolitics. Fermenting the sugars found in corn or other grains into ethanol …

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A bunch of stuff I wrote about biomass hits the Web

Earlier this year I wrote a lot of fact sheets about various aspects of biomass for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Those fact sheets are now online: you can drill down from the main page. The largest section of what I wrote dealt with agricultural residue. Here’s what’s on that page, with links leading to more …

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Genetic modification of large animals just got easier

Efforts to genetically modify large animals have been hindered by the fact that the two methods currently used to effect it, somatic cell nuclear transfer or pronuclear injection, are costly, inefficient, difficult, and carry a risk of producing abnormal offspring. Now researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have successfully produced genetically …

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Who needs a flash drive…

…when you’ve got DNA? Japanese scientists say it might be possible to use DNA to store text, images, music and other digital data for thousands of years inside living organisms. Masaru Tomita and colleagues at Tokyo’s Keio University say data encoded in an organism’s DNA, and inherited by each new generation, could be safely archived …

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Cotton: it’s what’s for dinner

Or, at least, it could be soon: “The exciting finding is that we have been able to reduce gossypol – which is a very toxic compound – from cottonseed to a level that is considered safe for consumption,” said Dr. Keerti Rathore, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station plant biotechnologist. “In terms of human nutrition, it has …

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Genetic engineering

Though the word “biotechnology” sounds very modern, what it describes has been with us for centuries–if you define it, as one science encyclopedia does, as “using biological organisms, systems or processes to make or modify products.” In other words, the first time somebody discovered the wondrous change wrought in grape juice by fermentation, or an …

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