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Oh, hell, how did a Daily Mail link get to the front page? This is a british tabloid. You may as well be debating the veracity of a story about a wolf boy discovered in the wild.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/biology/article3667780...
I am curious how one might go about reproducing this exact ecosystem in other bottles by cloning the original, without adding contaminants. Under these assumptions selling clones could become a commercial proposition.
Oh, hell, how did a Daily Mail link get to the front page? This is a british tabloid. You may as well be debating the veracity of a story about a wolf boy discovered in the wild.
Would you prefer an article from the times? http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/biology/article3667780...
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The skepticism is entirely valid when the article in question is from the Daily Mail.
People really hate the daily mail, don't they? It's a tabloid, but realistically you should be skeptical about everything the press puts out. However, when it's a plant in a jar, being skeptical is really just being a crank. It's a plant in a jar. Who cares? Besides, just because more credible papers mention the guy doesn't change the fact that you have to take him for his word. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/…
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It really depends on the bacterial flora present in the container. Bacteria are incredibly diverse, and just as one decomposer may be a methanogen [1], a different species of bacteria present may be a methanotroph [2]. So given the right bacterial "mixture," a self-sustaining CH4 cycle is not unreasonable. Additionally, CO is a metabolite for some methanogenic bacteria, specifically in production of acetyl CoA [3]. M…
It would also make sense that bacteria would tend towards stable equilibrium populations - ie a lack of a particular nutrient would result in a limited population in the species that require that nutrient. By that logic if you had sufficient biodiversity to start there would be some limiting nutrient that would fix the stable state biomass of the whole system.
To me, metabolism is one of the most interesting biological topics. It is fascinating how intricate of a system has evolved and it shows how difficult it truly is to know the end consequences of changing literally any chemical concentration in the body.
Here is one of the more intricate maps for solely human metabolism: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/metabolic_pa.... Crazy stuff.
Oh, hell, how did a Daily Mail link get to the front page? This is a british tabloid. You may as well be debating the veracity of a story about a wolf boy discovered in the wild.
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We're not talking superfluidic Helium here... Glass or BPA should be fine... In that case the envelop is rigid and we might at well just suck out enough air to get buoyancy.
When I was reading about Sterling engines, people talked about H2 leaking straight through the steel walls of the container. I can't find a similar reference for helium, but it's conceivable, to a non-expert anyway. No superfluidity required.
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The Daily Fail version claims so, but that doesn't seem sufficient. Nonetheless, its clearly working. It'd be interesting to insert a probe through the cork and run a real-time analysis of the air composition.
Hmm. So over time the soil mass will decrease into nothing as the plant expands?
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I wonder if carbon dating would work. Seems like it ought to, since C14 is produced in the upper atmosphere, so if's been sealed then it wouldn't get any new C14. The small amount of decay over 42 years might be trouble to measure. A potentially crazier idea: measure the trace amounts of uranium, plutonium, and other long-lived fallout products. Atmospheric nuclear testing continued on a semi-regular basis until 1980…
We could also use tritium for dating the water.
I'm not sure about tritium dating for the water. Reading the USGS website on it, it seems to indicate that the way tritium dating works is that they seal some water in a copper tube and see how much helium magically appears as the tritium decays. They ask for two 500mL (two 1 pint) samples.
So if tritium has been decaying into a sealed glass container for 40 years, should there be a measurable amount of helium in the container?
