ANGELO'S TRAINER-BOX KEEPS SURGEONS SHARP AS A SCALPEL

A KIDNEY HAS TO GO

My brother-in-law’s still a handsome guy in his mid seventies. He’s fiercely loyal to my sister and his kids, a “drivin’ fool” who runs his magnificent RV across country at the drop of a beanie, and he’s the “go to guy” in the family when it comes to automotive questions.

But for several years, he’s been battling cancers acquired (probably) during his military service.

R’s been in remission for seven years thanks to the remarkable work of Dr. Shimon Slavin (International Center for Cell Therapy & Cancer),  a pioneer in immunological therapy. Recently, however,  a mass was discovered on one of R’s kidneys.

The kidney has to go.

A DECISION HAS TO BE MADE

R had to decide between an open incision or laparoscopy, the new “modern” approach, which involves manipulating tiny tools inside the abdominal cavity while observing with a tiny video camera. Laparoscopy is all done through small holes in the abdomen rather than through a large incision and can mean faster recovery and less scarring.

“You’re the science guy, R said.  What do you think? Should I take a chance on laparoscopy?”

“Well, the recovery’s easier with laparoscopy,” I said. “What’s not to like?”

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’m afraid they’ll have to chop up the kidney to remove it. I wouldn’t want all that cancer juice sloshing around in me.  Who knows what other organs could be affected.”

R’s fears certainly seemed reasonable. In fact, surgeons do worry about “spills”, cells that drip from an instrument during surgery.  So I called Angelo Tortola (Venture Technologies) who designs the tools used in these procedures. He also makes the training simulators that surgeons use to perfect their techniques.

After explaining a little about my brother-in-law’s background and describing the problem, I asked him if he could help.

“You called the right guy,” he said. “I had to give up one of my own kidneys about two years ago.”

Since Angelo had never mentioned this to me, I was very surprised.

“You’re OK now, right?”

“Completely. The cancer was fully contained. But I have a story.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“My doctor was ‘old school’. He was determined to go with an open incision.  Even after I asked about laparoscopy, he stuck to his position. Safer. Best result.

“But the more I read, the more I wondered.  Finally, I set up an appointment at Mass General Hospital in Boston with a leading surgeon – one who I happened to know did a lot of laparoscopic procedures.

“After reviewing my situation, he said I would be a good candidate for laparoscopy but I could choose an open procedure if I wished.

“I asked him about the relative advantages. He said that laparoscopic removal of a kidney was just as safe as an open procedure with lower risk of certain complications during recovery.

“So, I asked, how do I decide?

“Well, he said, with the open procedure it’ll take you longer to get back on your feet.

“How much longer? I asked.

“With the open procedure, it could be up to a year till you are fully normal, he said. With laproscopy, you should be functional within a few days.”

“Now THAT,” Angelo said, “is an amazing difference. And, you know what? He was right.  A couple of weeks later, I was on an airplane, on the way to a meeting.”

I asked Angelo about R’s concern. Does the kidney get chopped up before it is removed?

“Not to worry,” Angelo said. “That’s not how they do it. The organ is removed in one piece. And everything’s placed in a plastic bag before removal.

“You tell your brother-in-law that either choice is safe. It’s up to him.”

JEEZ! WHAT NEXT?

HANG UP THE OXYGEN HOSE?

The guy in the next cubicle grabs his chest and passes out.  Five long minutes later, the paramedics show up. On goes the oxygen mask. That should help, right?

Not exactly.

An article in the Cochrane Systematic Review lays it out.  387 patients. 14 deaths. The ones on oxygen? Three times as likely to croak.

Dr. Juan Cabello, says it’s amazing that emergency medical personnel have been routinely administering oxygen without proof that it works.

Amazing.

Much more data is needed before the profession changes a “gold standard”. But this information will get ‘em thinking.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 6 .

Startling and intriguing. Larger study needed.

EASY WITH THE UMBILICAL CORD CLAMP

According to Paul Sanberg (Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair) blood keeps circulating in the umbilical cord for a little while after delivery. And that blood contains pluripotent stem cells.

Waiting at least an extra 30 seconds is good. Less intraventricular hemorrhage, sepsis,  and anemia. Less need for  for blood transfusions too.

So, OBVIOUSLY, we should wait, right?  Except those durn stem cells are mighty valuable. If you wait, you may lose them.

What’s the right thing to do?

Dunno.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = GBTYOTO (Get Back To You On This One)

How come everything’s so durn complicated?

MORE COFFEE, LESS BUZZZZ

Neuropsychopharmacology Journal: A study about coffee habituation . Do you get the same buzz, the same “wake up” effect, from a cup of coffe if you’re a heavy coffee drinker?

Wanna guess?

Of COURSE not! It’s like anything else. You build up tolerance. You even get a little hooked. Try going  ”cold caffeine” sometime.

YOU GOTTA DIE TO BECOME OIL?

Coal, gas, and oil are hydrocarbons. They start out as living things.  Old reptiles, fish, leaves.

Even poop.

Which gets buried, compressed, and “cooked”.

That’s how it works.  Living things are the raw material. Geological processes take over from there.  That’s where most of our energy comes from.

That’s the official story, anyway.

But there may be a d-e-e-p-e-r explanation. Maybe way down in the earth’s mantle, nature manufactures hydrocarbons direct from the raw materials without requiring the intermediate steps that rely on dead life forms.

Would that mean there’s enough oil for a billion trillion years if we can figure out how to get down to it? Could we, mayhaps, have enough black stuff to TOTALLY cook the atmosphere?

It’s a theory.

We, obviously, know some GREAT ways to drill a couple of miles under the Gulf Of Mexico, but sampling the hydrocarbons 40, 50,  60 miles down’s an awful crimp for the budget of most research labs.

Researchers at Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory described (Nature Geoscience) a more convenient way to figure out if there’s anything to this idea.

They had a diamond anvil cell lying around. And a laser. So they thought, “Well, wouldn’t it be fun to see what happens to methane at, say, 20 thousand times atmospheric pressure and at 2240 degrees Fahrenheit?” The same conditions that exist miles and miles down below your feet.

So they did.

The result? According to the article, ethane, propane, butane, hydrogen, and graphite. The process appears to be somewhat reversible too. Ethane to methane.

What’s this got to do with anything?

If deep sources of hydrocarbons migrate, gradually, to the surface of the earth, this may suggest that our nonrenewable  energy sources are likely to endure far longer.

That’s a good thing.

I guess.

ALCOHOL MAKES YOU SNEEZE

Well it does. Alcoholic drinks have histamine in them. That’s the stuff that gets your allergies going.  Anahad O’connor (New York Times) explains.

Twice as bad for women.

KIDS GET HIGH CHOLESTEROL?

Kids don’t have high cholesterol.

Well, hold on; they might (article in the Journal of Pediatrics). In fact, 1 in 3 kids have high levels of “bad” cholesterol.

Which is scary.

But what do you do? You gonna put a kid on cholesterol drugs?  Could be forever.

Would this give them healthier, better, longer lives?

Unless we do put kids on cholesterol reducing drugs, we’ll never know. Should kids be guinea pigs?

Should guinea pigs be guinea pigs?

ScienceAintsoBad‘ll be sure and let you know when they clear this up. For now, the American Academy of Pediatrics has some new guidelines which seem reasonable.

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PocketPad

GOOGLE ANSWERS THE IPAD. RAISES IT ONE.

Mister ScienceAintSoBad tried out the Droid X, Verizon’s very latest Android phone.

Which isn’t easy. They’re gone.

Sold out.

Why?

Cause customers got the idea right away.

Terrific app phone.

ALMOST too large.

Almost.

Makes yer pocket look funny.

It’s so large (and fast and easy to see) that you can pretty much do all that stuff you wanna do WITHOUT having to cart around a “computer”.

Which, keyboard or no, the IPad is.

You want funny looking pockets, put an IPAD into your pocket.

Funny.

At 4.3 inches, the “X” pushes the size of an app phone right up to the envelope. But it’s still pocketable. It’s still a phone.

LITTLE awkward.

So is love. So is parasailing. So is paying yer phone bill.

It’s a compromise. A MUCH better one than a tablet computer. The soft  keyboard’s big enough to make for near touch typing (in landscape mode). Videos engulf you.  Enough room to stuff in plenty of battery.  Plenty of speaker. This isn’t resonant, wall pounding base but, for a phone? Wow!

There’s even room for a functional (and hand insensitive) antenna. (Insensitive to hands as far as I could tell.  Look for testing lab results on reception, not reviewer impressions, OK?)

I’m keeping a point on ice. I may need it for Samsung’s Galaxy S .

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 9.

Don't Ask. Don't Tell

GETTING SMART ABOUT DEMENTIA

Alzheimer’s.

A shelling.

It takes the you out of you.

Would you know if it was happening? Till now it’s been hard to be sure. The standard test is kinda wishy washy. You’re supposed to know it when you see it. Is it really Alzheimer’s disease? Is it depression? Hearing loss? Transient stroke?

How many liberals do you suppose are mistakenly diagnosed as demented? Happens all the time.

Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc just announced a test that’s startlingly accurate. 22% developed the disease within a year.  The study (Reisa A. Sperling et al) used a brain dye with a “PET” scan.

That’s not all. There’s other work at Rowan, Penn, and Drexel Universities using EEGs, skin tests, brain scans.

The standard test, itself,  is under review. First update in 26 years. It’ll include “biomarkers” and it’ll reflect advances in the understanding of the underlying pathology.

So.

Lucky us.

Soon we will be able to find out if the lights are going out.

Would you do it?

Kinda depends what you would do with the information, doesn’t it? Any hope of stopping it? Any chance of a cure?

At the least, you can get enough of a warning to prepare yourself and others.

And, who knows, maybe the news’ll be good. You DON’T have dementia.

You’re just a liberal.

(Don’t get mad. I made fun of conservatives LAST time!)

]]> http://scienceaintsobad.com/archives/4843/feed 0 http://scienceaintsobad.com/archives/4689 http://scienceaintsobad.com/archives/4689#comments Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:24:45 +0000 MISTER Science Ain't So Bad http://scienceaintsobad.com/?p=4689

EGGHEAD

MRSASB: You’re breaking my heart, man! Don’t Do this! You’re straying into political stuff where a real science guy has no business. Why is it YOUR concern which out-of-work losers get paid what? I wanna hear about which robots are smarter. Which robots are better dancers. Not INTERESTED in crying for society’s cast outs. That another blog. OK? FlintHeart00001

Yer TOUGH, FlintHeart. Even Einstein strayed into the dirty, dirty world of politics from time-to-time. Carl Sagan too.

It won’t happen again.

——————————————————————————-

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No Humans?

Technology CREATES jobs, right?

Unemployment’s kinda high.

Slow economy.

To get through the rough spot, employers have been p-r-e-t-t-y creative. Every possible trick. Technology aplenty.

Not that I’m worried. In Business Week, I read that robots create more jobs than they destroy. Robots, kiosks, voice recognition system. All fruits of the labor of human designers, manufacturers, implementers of all kinds.

If anything, technology means more jobs and more interesting work.

Well.

Jeff Burnstein, the author of the Biz Week article I quote above,  is head of the Robotic Industries Association.

Tongue.

Cheek.

Here’s the thing. Some things’re true till they aren’t anymore.

Then, they’re not so true.

Robots have been around. We’re used to them. Nobody died. (I could research this. Maybe a robot ate somebody.)  And, at times, employment’s been just fine while “machine heads” were welding away at car companies.

In bad times, we target our rage at giant job sucking winds wafting Mexican spices our way. But technology is our friend. More jobs than it eliminates.

This is CERTAINLY what MISTERScienceAintSoBad likes to think. He is a HUGE proponent of techology and science (‘case you haven’t noticed). Huge.

But I got this day job, too. Where I’m sposed to be objective. Look at evidence. Scientific approach. (Science is an elaborate way of being honest with ourselves. You can quote me.)

So.

What’s WITH this sticky, sticky unemployment number that’s spooking investors? Maybe something new is happening. Maybe we’re slipping into the “robotic age” – the one where all our work’s done by machines? Where we live lives of leisure, living on I don’t know what?

Matthew Bleicher’s (Robots FTW) unsure. His “bet” is that us human’ll still get to flip a burger or two. But he admits he could be wrong.  Rosemary Black (NY Daily News)  describes the way that robots are now being deployed in the work place “side by side with humans”. She describes a hospital in Silicon Valley where “..Tug robots deliver meds, take out the trash and even speak politely to human workers and patients. Leasing the robots costs the hospital about $350,000 annually, while hiring that many people would have cost more than $1 million a year.”

Katharine Gammon (Wired Magazine) is less nuanced. She says robots are “stealing” American jobs in warehousing.

Larceny.

Where’s  this leading?

PUNCH LINE

The punch line? Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works, talks about ordering food at a MacDonald’s kiosk.

Too good. Too easy. The kiosk was fun. Got him thinking. He sees a “seismic shift” in the American work force for which we aren’t prepared. He points to  five million jobs lost from the retail sector already. Just the beginning, he says. You wait.

MisterScienceAintSoBad has to let you down. Can’t give you the definitive answer here. Can’t boil down the evidence. There ISN’T “evidence” for future events. We don’t yet KNOW if technology’s starting to truly destroy the base of employment).  We DO know that vigilance is the price of living in this century. Can’t live yer life by cliches . Real estate CAN go down.  So can skyscrapers. So can economies.

Things change. Expect the unexpected.

In the past, technology HAS created more jobs than it has taken away. A truism.

We hope.

Note to investors. If, by some chance, we ARE in the middle of “the big one” where  technology crowds humans out of the workplace, this has implications. High unemployment may NOT mean recession anymore.  The “salaries” of the unhired workers wind up in balance sheets as “retained earnings”. Which isn’t very fair, is it?

So.

In the interest of fairness, social justice, and, most important of all, social order, gotta figure out a proper way to get those resources back to the new leisure classes before they get too bony.

Should be a mere exercise in Democracy, right?

What do YOU think?

MISTERScienceAintSoBad doesn’t write about economics much. It is a science. But nobody seems to BELIEVE it. So I get dirty looks when I write about it.

Still. Economics has its uses.

Right now the US economy’s suffering from serious butt-drag as it recovers (Please ScienceGod) from the recession. So, naturally, some want to stimulate things a little more. Course, the other side of it is that there’re concerns about raising revenues so the government doesn’t go broke.

Is it possible to do both? Can you lower taxes (tax RATES, that is) and still make a buck doing it? Can we separate the politics and the BS from the EVIDENCE?

A thought experiment:

EINSTEIN’S ELEVATOR.

In 1905, Albert Einstein was thinking about elevators.

“Whoa!,” he said. ” I shove my physics professor into a falling  elevator. He says ‘what a cool little room with no gravity.’  When it hits bottom? No more elevator. No more Herr Kleiner. No more finals.”

” This is my happiest thought,” Einstein said.

Smart guy, that Einstein.

LAFFER’S CURVE.

Thought experiments aren’t limited to physics.

At a 1974 meeting, Arthur Laffer, an economist from the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, took out his ballpoint pen – the one with the American flag on it. He drew a curve on a napkin for an attentive Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. President-to-be Gerald Ford was there too.

SIMPLE!

“Not to oversimplify, but couldn’t we oversimplify the way taxes are calculated?,” he said. “Mind if I use yer napkin?”

“uh..”

“Two axes, OK? The one going up? That’s all the revenues for the government. Then.. crap! Pencil broke. could you pass me that one? Then, across the page are tax rates, OK?”

“See on the left where I put the zero? That’s where we show how much revenue we make if we don’t charge any taxes.”

“Dick? You’re a smart guy, how much would that be?”

“Uh..”

“EXACTLY! There wouldn’t BE any revenues because the tax rate is ZERO! Now look at the other extreme. What if we charge a hundred percent taxes? What then?”

“Dick?”

“Isn’t that a little edgy?”

“EXACTLY, Dick! Would you (or any Republican you know) go to work every day, knowing you don’t get to keep a penny?”

“How much power would I have?”

“Forget power, Rumsfeld. You’re overcomplicating things. This is a THOUGHT experiment.”

“No power?”

“Do you see power along that axis? Try to focus. OK, man?”

Rumsfeld adjusted his tie.

“So. You’re with me, so far, right? 100% taxation – government revenues go to zero. Same with 0%. ”In between there’s a curve. It rises up and then it falls back down. We’ll label the peak ‘Equilibrium’. Ok?”

“This is a nice  SCIENTIFIC way to understand tax policy AND you will note that tax rates to the right of curve are kinda counterproductive. If you increase the rate, revenues go down. Lower the rates, and revenues go up. And I’ll TELL you something, gentlemen, I’m p-r-e-t-t-y sure we’re on the right hand side of that curve.”

Cheney raised his hand.

“Don’t DO that!”

“What?”

“Raise your HAND! You’re the Ambassador to NATO. You don’t raise your hand. You just talk.”

“OK,” Cheney said, lowering his hand.

“So, you’re saying we could LOWER the tax rate and make a profit on the deal?”

“I don’t believe I would call it that.”

“You’re SAYING that we can project power ALL over the third world, scare the URINE out of Russia, finally order some decent o-rings for the Space Shuttle and still reduce the deficit at the end of the year? All by LOWERING the tax rate?

“Only a napkin. Let’s not get TOO carried away.”

“This is sensational,” Rumsfeld chimed in. Wait’ll the Bushes hear about this one.

“Look, this is a little simplistic.”

“Which is perfect, really. You don’t WANT to have Congress deal with anything complicated. Been there. Regretted that.”

At the end of the meeting, the three prominent officials went away feeling inspired.

The professor wanted to get his napkin back.

MISTERScienceAintSoBad realizes that “Laffer’s Curve” can’t go up against Einstein’s  refined thought experiments.  ”The Curve” was a little more back-of-the-napkin. Trying to make a point, not a revolution.

And it oversimplifies who pays taxes and how. The extreme behaviors (100% and 0%) are just assumptions which SOUND right but might not BE right.

The whole thing’s a little fuzzy.  What’s the time frame? Would a change in tax rates have an effect in two years? Twenty years? How would we sort that out? What about all the different tax brackets? And the corporations? And the nonprofits? And the underground economies?

However. I’ve heard crazier ideas. I’ve COME UP with crazier ideas.

So COULD the government reduce taxes and make more money?

Best we can tell – and with profound regrets – it is probably UNlikely that (in most conditions) decreasing taxes’ll boost tax collections.

NOBODY’S beyond suspicion where there’s a potential political agenda, but the independent Center On Budget and Policy Priorities looked at this four years ago and pissed off a lot of people by failing to find evidence for a negative correlation between tax rates and collections. This seems consistent with other serious scholarship.

Doggone!

Couple of notes:

My reportage might be a little off when it comes to the above conversations where fun trumps accuracy. But the curve is Laffer’s (who concedes its origins go back to Keynes and, even, Khaldun). And, while MISTERScienceAintSoBad, might not be able to resist spicing up some verbiage, he would never tinker with the facts themselves.  Evidence RULES!

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IT'S THEIR MOVE!

THROW A FEW IDEAS AT IT

My sweet wife can’t look at the photos of gooey pelicans. “I’d like to grab the guys behind this and stuff THEIR heads in a barrel of oil”.

My sweet wife.

PLEASE don’t hate MISTERScienceAintSoBad for saying this, but there’s good.

You’re NUTS, Mister SASB. Name one good thing.

Sure.

It’s a GOOD thing that SO many creative people’re chiming in to with ideas. It’s inspiring.

People care.

And they want to help.

When we’re not screwing up the environment, we can be awfully smart and good hearted hominids.

As you know, several “official” solutions were tried and tossed before the “top hat” version which seems to be doing an OK job with the oil flow till that well can be properly euthanasized (probably with a “bottom kill”  of heavy fluids followed by cement pumped into the lower portion of the casing).

However it’s the ideas from “out there” that’re flowing faster than the black mucky stuff.

Maybe you heard about Kevin Costner’s Ocean Therapy machines ? Large centrifuges that can separate oil and water in the quantities required for a spill like this? And John Hofmeister (used to run Shell Oil Company) has been all over the place with a plan to suck the oil into supertankers.

A professor of engineering from the University of Pittsburgh came up with a reusable cotton filter that gets coated with an oil blocking polymer. Works great. There’s even a video. Di Gao says that large filters made of this material could be dragged through the Gulf, capturing the surface oil.

The many other proposals include some for WAY cool explosives to seal the thing, including some VERY exciting ones to use nukes. Ya want science, ya gotta be willing to experiment a little, right?

MISTERScienceAintSoBad still thinks there’s hope for our clumsy human race. We’ll get through this disaster, somehow.

You’ll see.

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moonbot

JAPAN WINS MOON RACE.

Japan just revealed some of its plans for space exploration including the amazing hope of landing a robot explorer on the moon by 2015 and having an entire base of robots by 2020. – fastcompany.com

Email from OldTrekie5: Jesus! The friggin’ Space Shuttle’s shutting down and we don’t have squat to replace it. Are you kiddin’ me? What’s wrong with this country? PLEASE Mister ScienceAintSoBad, you gotta jump on this one.  Thanks. We’re counting on you, man!

MisterScienceAintSoBad answers:

It’s “get real” time, OldTrekie. The national debt is about 13 billion dollars (wanna see how it breaks down?) . Humans in spacesuits do look neat but it’s IRRATIONAL to send people off to Mars and to the moon when we can’t afford to buy ourselves a good oil cleanup.

ROBONAUTS NOT ASTRONAUTS

We humans had our chance to be heroes. It’s the turn of the robots now. Human space exploration isn’t too healthy for the humans doing the exploring (tendency to get nauseous,  irradiated, and, from time-to-time, blowed up) . It’s also super expensive.  And “human friendly” space systems dramatically stretch out the time it takes to get anything launched. So why not turn robots loose on the these projects? Worked on Mars, didn’t it?

A robonaut program would intensify our knowledge of sensors, communications, software systems and robotics, itself. That’s a bad thing?

Hey. It’s not like we have an alternative; we can’t AFFORD our “manned” programs. But I guess we’re gonna shuffle around fer awhile “studying it” till we admit the obvious. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, guess who’s going to the moon with a bevy of beautiful bots? Our Japanese comrades, that’s who.

Kadsuhiko Shirai, President of Waseda University, is the head of a government panel in charge of making us look silly while we’re scratching our butts debating the issue. “SHOULD we send humans to the moon? CAN we send humans to the moon? Whoops! Are those Japanese robots I see walking around on the moon?”

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OTHER STUFF

Oil Spill

I SUPPOSE MisterScienceAintSoBad should have something more to say about the oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico. But he’s as depressed about it as you are. We’re all riding this big wobbly planet together with nobody else to help us if we screw it up before we figure out how to drive it properly. Science is interesting and amusing. But it’s the competition that offers religious salvation. Don’t get TOO snooty. If we keep fouling things up, we may need them.

For this disaster, we’ll leave the blaming and the investigating to others, but if it makes you feel any better, we award the BP disaster in the Gulf Of Mexico a ScienceAintSoBadRating of ZERO .

Inventions

Our LectricLifter (TM) product’s coming along (slowly, I admit). We’ve actually had a  meeting with the testing lab (for the equivalent of UL listing) and we’re pretty sure we know who will be manufacturing it.

CORRECTION (Thanks, Alano)

The national debt should only BE 13 billion dollars. Make that 13 TRILLION big ones.

]]> http://scienceaintsobad.com/archives/4468/feed 5 http://scienceaintsobad.com/archives/4423 http://scienceaintsobad.com/archives/4423#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 22:41:37 +0000 MISTER Science Ain't So Bad http://scienceaintsobad.com/?p=4423

Not So Hungry?

A BAD THING

If you’re just getting over a coma, first of all, welcome back.  You will be the last to hear this but,  last month, a large oil drilling platform, leased to British Petroleum, exploded and sank,  releasing hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf Of Mexico.  As of now, the oil’s still flowing.

You’re right. This isn’t very good for the ecosystem.

THE QUESTION

MISTERScienceAintSoBad wasn’t surprised to receive the following letter.

MisterSASB: How ya doin’, Man? I can’t believe those blankety blank Brits, lettin’ their frigin’ oil contaminate our water like that. I contributed my pantyhose and I pretty much sheared my poodle naked for those new oil booms?But here’s my question. What about bugs? Aren’t there bugs that’ll eat that oil? Why don’t we sprinkle them around? I’ll take my answer off the air. - NoCount19

YES AND NO

Dear NoCount:

Nice of you to ask me the hard ones.

Sure. There are bacteria that  enjoy eating oil. Good thing too. If there weren’t we would REALLY be in a mess since we human are slobs. This Gulf thing’s an extreme example, but, believe me, the oil chompers in nature don’t go long between meals.

It’s true that bacteria have been cooked up in labs just for this purpose but the varieties of bacteria that live in the wild are hard to beat (article in Science Insider). The best  approach seems to be to spread nutrients around the beaches so the microbes that’re already out there will go crazy. They can do a hell of a job in a few months .

But I don’t want to be MISTERPollyanna here . This amount of oil will hurt the crap out of fish and plants and no hungry bugs’re gonna change that reality. Bacteria and sunlight combine to greatly limit the damage from moderate amounts of oil but an article in National Geographic (Christine Dell’Amore) explains the difference between oil (which nature CAN handle somewhat) and thick layered GOBS of oil which truly has the potential to do terrible damage to our fragile world.

THE FUTURE

The future could be brighter. Work at the German Research Center for Biotechnology on alcanivorax borkumensis may get “human introduced” microbes back into the game. Alcanivorax borkumensis really thrives on oil. It shows up, after awhile,  in places that are contaminated. Uninhibited by the fact that much of the nitrogen in oil is inorganic, it can get its nitrogen in any form, organic OR inorganic.  This strange bacterium could give us substantial help in living with the side effects of our energy needs.