Looks like someone at Indiana University worked out away to use a modified virus to produce and/or catalyze hydrogen. Which is awesome. Hopefully this turns into what lets us start mass producing cheap hydrogen.
also hopefully this doesn't end up causing a worldwide epidemic ending in the fiery death of all life on the planet.
My first thought was bigger bombs. If necessity is the Mother of invention, weaponization is its abusive step-Father. And then there's suffocation. The air we breathe consists of a unique cocktail. So would mass producing hydrogen be necessarily a good thing?
sure, as long as it was controlled, the purpose of course would be for a clean burning alternative to coal and other fuels. The byproduct of burning hydrogen is H2O.
To be fair to StalaggtIKE's concern, the dominate gas in Earth's atmosphere used to be CO2 until bacteria and land plants converted most of it into oxygen. Then in the time before there were enough oxygen breathing animals on land so much oxygen built up that entire landmasses burned because of forest & grass fires started by simple lightning strikes. But I don't see that happening in this case because even if a virus escaped a manufacturing plant or lab and began mass producing hydrogen in the wild, there's too many competing organisms in the biosphere now for it to take over to the scale the oxygen producing organisms did.
Why can't that create a virus that gives all the cute girls fox ears and a tail? You know.. Something actually useful for once.
Looks like we're pretty terrible about managing even the most basic SCIENCE! of our days. Like sleep, for example.
SpaceX has another mission coming up that's worth a watch. They'll be attempting to land on a barge for a second time with a re-usable first-stage rocket.
Yeah we're pretty much in the stone age when it comes to sleeping. To be fair, I'm always looking for the next doomsday scenario. I like to expect the worse then be pleasantly surprised.
Just the ears and tail, you gone and went full furry on us. See I just want the ears and tail which is this You went and jumped to this Spoiler Back to science. What ever happened to that experimental algae that created oil as a byproduct of its photosynthesis. Last I heard they were doing really well but that was years ago. Also I did the thing that eventually happens to all threads.
There's some issues involved in growing them that's cost effective. They require a lot of fertilizer and fertilizer requires phosphorous, and phosphorous is becoming more and more scarce on our planet right now. That's a separate issue that's starting to become quite serious and it's effecting a lot of industries.
I'm in danger of gushing about how much I love Spice and Wolf, so I'm just going to talk SCIENCE! instead. One problem I have with staying current with tech news is seeing stuff like permanent optical memory being developed and then having to sit through the lag time between that and when it finally reaches the consumer market.
