deo

I really don't think you have anything to worry about. The plastic these little guys eat needs to be partially degraded and broken up into smaller pieces for them to make any meaningful digestive progress. It's exceedingly unlikely the bacteria themselves are going to get efficient enough that your non-waste plastic stuff is in any danger. More likely, the enzymes themselves will be used as part of a larger controlled industrial process (enzyme recapture is important to staying cost effective after all). Even if that wasn't the case, these bacteria are suited for life in a landfill, not in your pipes.

Exactly. The plastic we want them to eat is already degraded to some degree by the elements or usage, and is thus the low-hanging fruit. I'd assume it's much easier to digest, since it's partially broken down already and has plenty of convenient micro-fissures to exploit.

Except it doesn't hold up in the elements all that well, though (at least in a form that is still usable, the plastic is still there, just in little pieces and/or without the desired structural integrity). Plastics degrade when exposed to sunlight and oxygen (photo-oxidation). Combine that with mechanical action of waves, and now you have a bunch of little plastic bits floating in the ocean that are even harder to clean up (but easier for the bacteria to eat!). A glass or metal bottle will hold up much better than a plastic one, over a long enough time period.

But they even break down when exposed to temperature cycling and mechanical stress over long periods of time. I'm sure you've also noticed old plastic food containers, get harder and harder to clean and start getting cloudy: that's the plastic breaking down and micro-fissures appearing on the surface, thanks to repeated exposure to dishwashers, freezers, and still-hot leftovers. Once again, a glass dish is gonna hold up much better.

They have to use special additives for plastics intended for long-term outdoor use (the additives are like sunscreen for plastic, they absorb the UV so that the plastic doesn't) to combat these reaction pathways. And I'd bet money that if plastic-eating bacteria end up becoming a problem, there will be additives we can use to discourage them for appropriate applications.

But you'll notice that in the case of plastic in landfills, there's no UV light from the sun, basically no oxygen, and any mechanical stress or temperature cycling isn't enough for fast breakdown of the plastic polymers. These conditions are also very different from, say, your kitchen counter or hospital storage rooms. If the plastic-eating bacteria prefers the landfill habitat (or literally cannot thrive in any other environment -- which is not an uncommon phenomenon; in the article, they mention difficulties culturing bacteria for study in a lab environment), then we have a perfect tool for breaking down landfill plastics that won't impact in the slightest the plastics things we want to keep. Similarly, the kind of bacteria that could be useful for ridding us of fishing lines and nets floating around in the ocean would most likely not be well suited for non-aquatic environments.

For me, the vaccine seemed to prevent catching the first few variants quite well, but i eventually caught the Omicron (probably, idk for sure) variant. My SO showed symptoms first, and neither of us tested (nasal swab) positive until ~24hrs after symptoms appeared.

i dunno why you gotta call me out like that...

I will keep it there for future historians.

great, now i have spit coffee all over the place. thanks for the laugh!

There's also a time component. Food can be quick, cheap, or healthy: but you can only choose two (at most). If people have to work for too many hours for shit pay, "unhealthy" becomes an undeniable option.

This sounds promising. I think he'd appreciate having the out-of-the-box niceties of a DE, too.

I'd play that video game.

Maybe if they didn't spend so much money on those horrible TV ads they'd have enough for R&D. And evergreening isn't innovation anyways, so idk what they're on about.

Absolutely. I did not mean to imply that small daily-life changes are all that is necessary, just that we shouldn't count them as useless just because they are small impact. At the very least, it is a tool i use to keep climate-change-induced depression and anxiety at bay enough to make "real action" something i'm mentally capable of.

Yes, but making changes in my own life (as small as they may be in the grand scheme of things) helps me feel a little less depressed about the whole thing. So many of the most impactful changes are outside of my control. Yes, i can, to some extent, make my voice heard and push for policy changes, and I can refuse, to some extent, to purchase from or invest in companies that are the biggest polluters and carbon-users. But I'm not a CEO of a multinational oil and gas conglomerate, nor am I in charge of making policy decisions for the country (hell, I live in a very red state, so my vote essentially doesn't count, outside of local elections).

But I do have the power to set an example. It is always good to make changes that you can, even if it's comparitively negligible. I think if everyone made the effort to live more sustainably, the people that actually have the power to make big changes may feel more pressure to do something (people asking "if i can do it, why can't they" when voting or making purchases or investments could have a big effect if we all did it together). It would also help show the greenwashing that a lot of companies engage in as a facade (people that actually know what it takes to reduce their carbon footprint would be more aware of what does and doesn't have an impact). Possibly... Maybe we're all screwed and there's nothing we can do about it and civilization as we know it will come crashing down around us. But I think hope is a good thing to hold on to in the meantime, and doing what I can in my own life gives me hope.

One number to track them all, One number to find them, One number to sell for ads, And in the metadata bind them.

I used to hold it in the pencil position, but now i use the knife position example photo here. The pencil position requires you to use more thumb/wrist muscles, but the knife position helps me keep my wrist straight and use my forearm muscles more.

Instead of answering your question, I'm going to share a fan theory that I found quite amusing: The Jetsons and The Flintstones actually happen contemporaneously. When nuclear war caused civilization as we know it to collapse, wealthy individuals moved to space, while everyone else was left to scrape by as they could in the irradiated leavings of our old society.

The Jetsons are decendants of those wealthy people that made it out. Society is relatively the same, just in space with robots. Their technology has progressed in a reasonable fashion from the 1960s tech they took off Earth with them. The Flintstones are decendants of the people left behind. That's why all their "stone age" technology is so reminiscent of everyday 1960s tech. As they attempted to rebuild, they took inspiration from the pre-nuke past. The radiation caused genetic mutations, leading some animals to express dinosaur-like traits.

South-eastern US checking in. I think "oppressive" is the most apt word. It feels very still outside; amazed I haven't drowned from the humidity. Even the birds sound exhausted.

I've never had an issue, outside of bios updates (see last paragraph). I've even booted into windows after hibernating in linux (but not the other way around, since I don't let windows hibernate; not saying you can't, just that I don't), and everything was fine when i got back. I use a swap partition for hibernating, in case you're curious.

I do try to make sure I'm watching when it reboots after a windows update (because linux is my default, so i have to select windows from the boot loader) just in case, but i've also fucked that up a time or two with no ill effects.

My one piece of advice is: once you get it working, take a picture of your bios settings. You may have to fix some settinga after bios updates, as they can get set back to the default values. I did not do this, and while it led to a very confusing afternoon due to my inexperience, it would have been a non-issue if I'd have taken some pictures and known to look at them.

Sleeping with wrist guards really does make a world of difference. And maybe there is some way to do the repetitive tasks in a more ergonomoc way? For example, I crocheted a couple of pieces for friends' weddings in quick succession out of very tiny yarn, and it destroyed my wrists for several weeks after. Turns out, I'd been holding my crochet hook in a really stress-inducing way; I had just never had a reason to question my form until it started causing a repetitive stress injury. By just changing the way I held the hook, I started to see improvement almost immediately.

If I've recently over done it on the spicy food, then yes.

deo

@ deo @beehaw.org

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deo

We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world

The plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world

The plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world

I should buy a lottery ticket

I accidently rebooted during pacman update and now my system dosen't show option to boot into endeavour os. Systemd just shows option to boot into firmware interface please help!

SHARE WITH THE CLASS: What aliases are you using?

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Permanently Deleted

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I need a better body for my job

Let's play a game. How would you reboot The Jetsons if you were tasked with doing so.

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Peer reviewed