[Plasma Shield]

Plastics are polymers formed by hydrocarbons from crude oil. I’m surprised that there are bacteria that feed on that. Given how there are no proteins, or bio-organic matter to decompose.

A high school junior from Waterloo, Ontario conducted an experiment that involved mixing landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic, and left it in a tissue culture chamber I assume, and tested the decomposition rates against the decomposition rates if plastics without the mixture. It was found that the rates of decomposition was higher for the plastic in the landfill dirt mixture. After changing temperatures and growth variables, the bacteria was isolated and it was found that two were of the bacterial genera Pseudomonas and Sphingomonas.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an bacteria from the Pseudomonas genu.

Wikipedia: Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative, aerobic, rod-shaped bacterium with unipolar motility.An opportunistic human pathogen, P. aeruginosa is also an opportunistic pathogen of plants. P. aeruginosa is the type species of the genus Pseudomonas (Migula 1894).

I have no idea what any of that means, but it has been shown in various studies (more…)

I’ve found that, on the whole, science doesn’t lie to me. Science is like that irritating relation at the dinner party who tells you shitty ‘interesting facts’ when you really just want to drown your sorrows in brandy-soaked fruitcake. But you can still trust Science, because Science generally knows what the hell it’s talking about. And yeah, sometimes Science might be wrong. But, along the way, science sorts itself out via this little thing I like to call ‘peer review’ and ‘experiment validity’. Mmm. Tasty.

So, to drop the metaphor, I basically get the funny feeling that when a whole lot of people working independently reach the same conclusion it’s more than likely to be reasonably accurate. And if you don’t agree with me, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re a dirty communist.

Of course, when along the way we start to see some results that might have an impact politically people get all antsy in their pantsy about it (see: evolution). And a big one that’s going on right now is the issue of climate change.

So, basically today I’m going to focus on the people who believe that climate change is either not happening/incredibly unlikely to happen. In fact, all those people who don’t think we should bother doing anything about it. Essentially this post is just going to be one big bitchslap, which I understand you can do across the internet nowadays.

Image from UnKnownViper

Don’t get me wrong, though – I don’t ever want to stifle scientific debate (more…)