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Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

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Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#71

Post by cryoshon »

thfuran wrote: post #68
ysw0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this material can convert carbon much more efficiently than plants, it would indeed be a game changer.

Plants are essentially limited by one particularly slow enzyme. There are currently research efforts aimed at fixing that enzyme to make plants much more efficient. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25123951

unlikely imo. rubisco has been studied intensely for decades without making much headway. furthermore, the evolutionary pressure for an improved rubisco is so immense that if it were possible we'd probably see it in nature.

Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#72

Post by agumonkey »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #70
agumonkey wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already a lot. I'll try my luck with that :)

Actually I think it was in April. I was headed to a U2 concert in San Jose when I heard it, and it looks like that was in April. Depeche Mode was in August :)

tomorrow morning you'll have an epiphany about the name

Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#74

Post by fromthestart »

cryoshon wrote: post #71
thfuran wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plants are essentially limited by one particularly slow enzyme. There are currently research efforts aimed at fixing that enzyme to make plants much more efficient. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25123951

unlikely imo. rubisco has been studied intensely for decades without making much headway. furthermore, the evolutionary pressure for an improved rubisco is so immense that if it were possible we'd probably see it in nature.

>furthermore, the evolutionary pressure for an improved rubisco is so immense that if it were possible we'd probably see it in nature.

I disagree with this logic, as one could apply it to any theoretical biologic feature. The fact that random-walking evolutionary processes haven't stumbled upon a more optimal solution has nothing to do with whether such a solution exists or is easy to find.

Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#75

Post by Scriptor »

Pxtl wrote: post #57
Scriptor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought some houseplants a bit back and it's been fascinating to see how quickly they grow. The vast majority of that new mass literally comes from thin air.

My favourite for this are South American tillandsia. They have no roots. They just sit on a tree branch and eat air.

Yeah, it's neat how roots mostly just bring in phosphates, nitrates, and water. Incidentally, carnivorous plants only get their phosphates and nitrates from whatever they trap. All of the actual carbon in all plants come from the air or from dissolved CO2 in the water.

Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#76

Post by Edmond »

infinity0 wrote: post #17

What stops the thing from growing indefinitely, but also fast enough when damaged to return to the "original" state? If there's a "surface coating" which when damaged, causes the "inside" to "grow" again, how does the coating repair itself, to stop the "inside" from growing beyond the original surface?

proto-molecule ? :)

Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#77

Post by jdmichal »

fromthestart wrote: post #74
cryoshon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unlikely imo. rubisco has been studied intensely for decades without making much headway. furthermore, the evolutionary pressure for an improved rubisco is so immense that if it were possible we'd probably see it in nature.

>furthermore, the evolutionary pressure for an improved rubisco is so immense that if it were possible we'd probably see it in nature. I disagree with this logic, as one could apply it to any theoretical biologic feature. The fact that random-walking evolutionary processes haven't stumbled upon a more optimal solution has nothing to do with whether such a solution exists or is easy to find.

Specifically, the gradient crawl that evolution gives must yield viable organisms among every step. If something is within a local maxima that cannot be climbed out of while remaining viable, then evolution can't do anything by definition. That doesn't mean that a better global maxima doesn't exist, and an organism engineered to a better state.

Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#78

Post by zelias »

wcoenen wrote: post #23

> The chloroplasts are not alive but catalyze the reaction of carbon dioxide to glucose. That reaction also consumes water. So, would you need to regularly mist the material with a spray bottle to keep the self-healing going?

In places with rain, this problem can be solved with rain

Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#79

Post by derefr »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #60
Odenwaelder wrote: post #15

Can these surfaces "get cancer"? As in, for some reason, the reaction continues way beyond simply healing the crack?

Cancer is unregulated growth. Since the authors are moving towards non-biologically derived catalysts, there will be no life-derived chloroplasts like they are currently using. So, you're asking can a non-biologically derived material spread indefinitely beyond the filling in of small cracks in its surface? I don't think there's a risk of that based on the article. Is there another non-biological material that spread…

I think cancer is a more specific concept than just "unregulated growth." Cancer is a phenomenon that occurs when a valid "self-replicate then die" program has a similar encoding to a "self-replicate indefinitely" program, such that random-noise damage to the program's stored representation can result in the former being rewritten into the latter.

Whether or not the substrate is biological, I would think that you'd still have to worry about ensuring your program is encoded in such a way that the part of it that turns it off can't be damaged without disabling the program as a whole.

Re: Self-healing material can build itself from carbon in the air

#80

Post by derefr »

jdmichal wrote: post #77
fromthestart wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>furthermore, the evolutionary pressure for an improved rubisco is so immense that if it were possible we'd probably see it in nature. I disagree with this logic, as one could apply it to any theoretical biologic feature. The fact that random-walking evolutionary processes haven't stumbled upon a more optimal solution has nothing to do with whether such a solution exists or is easy to find.

Specifically, the gradient crawl that evolution gives must yield viable organisms among every step. If something is within a local maxima that cannot be climbed out of while remaining viable, then evolution can't do anything by definition. That doesn't mean that a better global maxima doesn't exist, and an organism engineered to a better state.

On the other hand, organisms are generally very "fault tolerant" systems in the small—if you get a crucial gene copied, and then one of the copies mutates to do something weird while the other remains functioning, the resulting organism is probably going to be viable, since the weird thing that the mutated copy of the gene does will [unless it's some very specific type of "weird thing" it's producing] be treated by the body as just another foreign enzyme to xenometabolize or foreign antibody to attack.

And the organism's genetic line can persist with that mutant gene indefinitely, building onto it until it becomes a useful feature.

(This isn't so true in especially small organisms, where an extra gene here and there might blow their size or resource budget. This is one of several things constraining the evolution of mitochondria, for example.)

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