Aeglaeca

Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category

The tyres of the future may be made from dandelions

Tremble, Michelin, tremble

OTHER than being an ingredient of the more recherché sorts of salad, herbal tea or wine, dandelions are pretty useless plants. Or, at least, they were. But one species, a Russian variety called Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), may yet make the big time. It produces molecules of rubber in its sap and if two research programmes, one going on in Germany and one in America, come to fruition, it could supplement—or even replace—the traditional rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis.

Despite the invention of synthetic rubbers, there is often no good substitute for the real thing, for nothing artificial yet matches natural rubber’s resilience and strength. This is because natural-rubber molecules, the product of a stepwise synthesis by enzymes, have a more regular structure than the artificial ones made by chemical engineering. Around a fifth of an average car tyre is therefore made of natural rubber. In an aeroplane tyre that figure can be more than four-fifths. Moreover, the price of synthetic rubber is tied to that of the oil from which it is made, rendering it vulnerable to changes in the oil price. Because oil is likely to become more costly in the future, natural rubber looks an attractive alternative from an economic point of view as well as an engineering one.

Natural rubber has problems, though. Growing Hevea in the Americas is hard. A disease called leaf blight means the trees have to be spaced widely. Even in Asia, currently blight-free, planting new rubber trees often means cutting down rainforest, to general disapproval. And trees, being large, take time to grow to the point where they can yield a crop. A smaller plant that could be harvested for its rubber therefore has obvious appeal.

To this end, Christian Schulze Gronover of the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology in Aachen, Germany, and his colleagues have identified the genes that allow TKS to produce usable rubber. In particular, they have discovered an enzyme called polyphenoloxidase that is responsible for making its rubbery sap coagulate.

From the plant’s point of view this coagulation is a good thing. The evolutionary purpose of rubber, and the reason why it has appeared independently in plants as diverse as trees, guayule and dandelions, is that it gums up the mouthparts of herbivorous insects. Human users, however, do not want it to coagulate too soon, and Dr Schulze Gronover has found a way to switch polyphenoloxidase off, using a technique called RNA interference. This intercepts and destroys the molecular messengers that carry instructions from the polyphenoloxidase gene to make the enzyme, meaning that rubber can be extracted more easily from the plant.

Meanwhile, in America Matthew Kleinhenz of Ohio State University is working on increasing the yield of rubber from TKS. Dr Kleinhenz is doing things the old-fashioned way, growing different strains of TKS, grinding up the roots (where most of the sap is found) to see which have the highest rubber content, and crossbreeding the winners. His aim is to create a plant that is both high-yielding and has roots chunky enough to be harvested mechanically by the sort of device now used to pick carrots.

Combining the two approaches—high-tech bioengineering and low-tech plant breeding—may produce that rarity in the modern world, a whole new crop species. It would also mark a step on a journey that some see as the way forward: a return to the use of plant-based products that have, briefly, been overshadowed by the transient availability of cheap oil.

SOURCE:  http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15172672&subjectID=348924&fsrc=nwl.

Current Mood: *Wink* & Cool

WRITING PROMPT: After returning from work, you walk into your house and notice an item that wasn’t there when you left in the morning. What room were you in, what was the item and how did it get there?

I went upstairs to the kitchen and made myself a glass of iced tea. I went to sit at the dining room table and turned on the TV in the living room. It was then that I noticed the wristwatch on the table.

My son came bounding in looking for a snack. “Is this your watch?”
“nope…” he garbled as his mouth filled with cookie.

I called my daughter to come upstairs and asked if it was hers or belonged to one of her friends. She too denied any knowledge of the watch.

The question now was… who had been in my house? Where did the watch come from? And did I dare pose the question to Joe – did I really want to hear the answer. My stomach began to sink.

“Joe, could you come up here for a minute?” He grumbled and said he’d be up ‘in a minute’; which always meant an hour. I just wasn’t important enough to disturb his video game.

A while later, after all of the conspiracies had plenty of time to formulate in my head, he came upstairs. I hid the watch. “Did anything happen today? Anyone stop by?”

“No, why?” I thought he looked nervous.

“Well, it’s just that I found something here on the table that doesn’t belong here. I was wondering where it came from.” Now I’d set the trap.

“What was it?”

“Nothing, I guess. It doesn’t matter. I’ll find out sooner or later.” With that he figured his part of the conversation was over. I decided to hide the watch until someone came looking for it.

Several days later after getting home from work early…

“Did you see a watch on the dining room table?” asked Joe, like he was asking me to pass the salt.

“Since when do you wear a watch?” I asked, knowing full well that he never wore one.

He balked. It was only for a second but I saw it. “It was a gift for my mother.” He stammered.

“Really? You never even talk to your mother. And it’s nowhere near her birthday.”

He started heating up. “Just give it back!”

“And the inscription on the inside of the band is ‘S.E.M.’… what I can only assume are initials. But those are not your mother’s initials.” I really had him sweating. ” Why don’t you tell me who it really belongs to and what they were doing in my house?!”

“Just give it back! I need to return it!” He was yelling now. He knew that he was caught in his own web of lies.

“To whom do you need to return it? I’m not giving it back unless you tell me the truth.” I spoke calmly and quietly, then paused for a moment. “In fact, I won’t return it to you at all. You can have the owner drop by and I’ll give to ‘her’ personally.” We both knew it was a ‘her’.

“Okay, I fucked up…,” he looked at his feet and shifted uneasily from side to side. “The watch belongs to a woman that I know and she stopped by here earlier this week.”

“And?” I knew what was coming.

“And I’ve been sleeping with her…” he waited for the explosion.

But to his confusion I didn’t react. I told him to wait and I would go and get the watch. I’m sure he thought I was despondent… too destroyed to even go into a jealous rage.

I went downstairs and into the bedroom. I had hidden the watch in my dresser. I got it and put it in my pocket. I stood there for a moment thinking about all the times he’d cheated. No… this wasn’t the first.

I didn’t think I could ever feel this way. Could it have finally come to this?

I went around to the other side of the bed and opened the bottom drawer of his bed stand. I retrieved the 9mm and the loaded clip lying next to it. I put the clip into the gun and pulled back the hammer. It was then that I realized what I was about to do – what HAD to be done.

I went upstairs and walked into the living room area and he was still standing there by the dining room table, wringing his hands. He looked up and I shot him. Center mass… his shock was palpable, I nearly laughed. I walked over and lovingly put the watch around his wrist. I whispered in his ear, “It’s over.” I stood up and shot him in the head at point blank range.

I went back downstairs and dutifully cleaned the gun before putting it away. The kids would be home from school soon.

Then I shook him awake. “Joe! Wake up!” He was sweating and writhing in bed next to me. When he finally came out of it he looked at me like I was the devil herself. He never did tell me what the nightmare was about. Oddly, he checked the bed stand before he left the room.

Check this out: Chimeras on the Horizon, but Don’t Expect Centaurs

Current Mood: Cool