Newsgroup: it.sport.nuoto
Titolo: [OT] Notizia veramente stramba

Pare che i rutti delle mucche... siano responsabili del 13% dell'effetto
serra dell'Australia.
Lo dice l'autorevole Economist, a cui sono abbonato..
veramente stramba 'sta cosa ..
l > >
Global warming
An injection of innovation
Jun 3rd 2004
From The Economist print edition
Vaccinating livestock may be a way to slow global warming
BURPING sheep and cattle may not sound much of a hazard, but their burps
contain methane, and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. In Australia, a
place with a lot of livestock, this methane amounts to 13% of the country's
greenhouse-gas emissions. That is a tempting target for politicians looking
for ways to meet Kyoto protocol targets without having to curb consumer
lifestyles.
But how do you stop a sheep burping? André-Denis Wright, of the Commonwealth
Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's laboratory in Perth, has
an idea. The methane is generated not by the animals directly, but by
bacteria that live in those animals' stomachs. So a vaccine against these
methane-generating bacteria should switch off the gas supply. On top of
that-and of more direct interest to farmers-methane-producing microbes
consume over a tenth of the food the animals eat, making cattle less beefy.
In a forthcoming paper in Vaccine, Dr Wright and his colleagues describe the
progress they are making towards such an inoculation. Most methanogens, as
the gas-producing stomach bugs are known, are not true bacteria. They
actually belong to a class of micro-organisms called the archaea, whose
separate existence was recognised only recently. The archaea are not well
understood, and are difficult to grow in a laboratory. And if a bug cannot
be grown in a laboratory, then a vaccine against it cannot be made.
Indeed, Dr Wright's first attempt fell at this hurdle. Constrained by what
he could grow, he made a vaccine against a mixture of seven of the
methanogens that he was able to grow from cow and sheep guts. It did not
work.
At that point he decided to try a different tack. Instead of restricting
himself to those stomach bugs he could grow, he sought to identify the full
range of what was there using a new technique called environmental genomics.
This trick, pioneered by Craig Venter in the United States, breaks all of
the DNA in a sample of liquid from, say, a stomach, up into small pieces. It
then sequences each piece to establish the order of the genetic "letters" in
it, and uses a computer to fit the pieces back together by matching the
overlaps between the sequences of letters. That way, if all goes well, the
genomes of the bugs in a sample will emerge from the soup of pieces, and the
organisms can be identified without the need to grow them.
The researchers surveyed the microbial populations of 17 sheep stomachs in
this way, and revealed several new species of methanogen, including some
from a group of archaea not previously known to inhabit digestive tracts.
Crucially, knowing the genomes of these ungrowable organisms allowed Dr
Wright to identify close relatives that it was already known could be grown.
He used three of these relatives to make a new vaccine, and got an 8%
reduction in methane production from the sheep he vaccinated.
Not a bad start, and certainly enough to prove the point. Dr Wright is now
extending his "library" of sheep methanogens by taking samples from around
Australia, in order to discover how much variation there is. He is also
planning to extend the work to cattle, which are ten times as gassy, but are
too big to fit in the current generation of gas-collecting boxes. If he
succeeds, he will be the toast of both environmentalists and ranchers-a rare
and enviable coincidence of views.

 l > >
merlinO
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Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/

 industrie... Se lo dice lui...
Se è per questo, ha pure detto che per combattere il problema degli 
incendi boschivi, basta procedere con la deforestazione..

 incendi boschivi, basta procedere con la deforestazione..
dal punto di vista logica, la sua argomentazione non fa' una grinza.
-- 
Son capaci tutti di dire "ti amo tanto" mentre stan facendo l'amore...

 dal punto di vista logica, la sua argomentazione non fa' una grinza.
Se nonchè, è dimostrato che la logica aristotelica non è infallibile..

Castel Chariot wrote:
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ok, ma niente boschi -> niente incendi boschivi. Su questo c'è poco da 
discutere.


 discutere.
Anche su questo c'č poco da discutere: niente cervello -> niente idee 
intelligenti :-)


Concordo appieno.
