jgourlay
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BIZARRE BIZARRE Help!!! Bioluminsescence!
Gents, this is a REALLY bizarre and out-of-left-field topic/event, but if you all could help me identify, I'd really appreciate it. Forgive the
detail: I'm trying to be complete.
1. I live in Houston, Texas
2. Last night, temperature was around fiftyish. It was well after sundown.
3. My son and I were planting tomatoes. The soil was sanding "potting soil" from a commercial soil outfit. This had been in the garden for a year.
On top of it, and what we were digging into was Black Kow that had been laid in rows 2 weeks prior.
4. The "event" happened soil next to or partially composed of an old rotten potato thrown into the garden at some prior point.
5. The event was this. I turned over a hand full of dirt and in my hand was a faint yet absolutely distinct cluster of green glow-in-the-dark
particles. The luminescence lasted no more than about 5 seconds. My son saw it also, and it looked like little stars. We dug around again and found
another, smaller cluster. Taken to the light, it had a texture unlike the rest of the dirt, but similiar to earthworm casts. Putting in the light
then taking it back out into the dark did not "recharge" the material.
Thus, the glowing seems to be some reaction with the air. Can anyone shed some light on this?
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hissingnoise
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WoW, jgourlay you've found a phosphorus mine - and on your land?
Seriously though, it just may have been wormcasts with particles of P within them.
It might have come from certain bacteria that can produce phosphorus-rich compounds which by biological action can be rich enough in P to oxidise in
air.
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jgourlay
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So....whatchyer saying is that I should try like hell to find more, then culture them?
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entropy51
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Foxfire not uncommony seen in the woods at night.
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hissingnoise
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Yeah, foxfire most likely - no phosphorus involvement probably!
A pity. . .
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chemoleo
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Thread Moved
5-3-2010 at 19:58 |
12AX7
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Cool!
Tim
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Vogelzang
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All you need are some solar panels and you can make a bioluminescent battery.
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hissingnoise
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Er, solar panels - bioluminescent battery? How would that work Vogelzang?
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chief
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If bacteriae or fungi with enough light-output could be cultivated, then it could be a way of making electricity ..., constructing the bioreactors
from photovoltaic materials ...
After all there already are devices which use the thermal radiation from fire to produce electricity by irradiating solar-cells; these are similar to
ovens, only with more advanced materials ...
[Edited on 8-3-2010 by chief]
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hissingnoise
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Perhaps I'm missing something here, but wouldn't the bacteria need to up their output by several orders of magnitude to produce even a measurable
current?
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12AX7
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I don't know of any life form that produces light you could not only read by, but generally work in without eye strain. At typical animal
efficiencies, it would take hundreds of watts worth of fuel to light up a room.
Combined with a solar panel and you'll find even thermocouples are more efficient. And they can run for decades from nuclear material (Voyager 1 and
2 are only now starting to slow down as their Pu238 has decayed noticably and the efficiency of their RTGs has decreased).
Tim
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chief
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Usually there probably are little amounts of bacteriae responsible for the light ... ; if these would be cultivted under optimal conditions then there
could be quite a lot of light ...
The efficiency the other way around, for photosynthesis, is said to be 30 % ... ; so maybe it could at least be made a 2-digit %age for the
light-emission ? Still a diesel engine from vegetable-oil would run much more efficiently, but that needs industrialized agriculturing, mechanical
parts, human supervision etc. etc.
Also as a byproduct of light-generating bioreactors there would be a lot of biomass, i.e. bacterial slime or dead fungi, which then could be used in
another process, for generating methanol as fuel ...
===========
Anyhow there now are much better ways for generating energy, but in the long run there might come up some developement ..., and the advantages would
be that it would run from simple bio-food, would be silent, still leave biomass for other processes etc. etc. ; if several processes could be
combined, then maybe there could be found a whole light-emitting food-chain ... (since someone above spoke of around 30 known processes for biological
light-emission ...)
===========
But this may well remain an unreachable utopy for the next 20 years ...
[Edited on 8-3-2010 by chief]
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12AX7
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As far as I know, the quantum efficiency for photonic processes in biological molecules (such as chlorophyll and luciferin) are quite high. However,
the overhead of the plant or animal consumes so much fuel that overall efficiency is atrocious. (Isn't ethanol from corn supposed to be like 2%
efficient overall? That's from sun to ethanol, so you've got some amount split between growth (and what goes into structural support, and lost to
respiration) and subsequent processing (harvest, milling, distillation), plus what the yeast take for themselves (hmm, I don't know offhand what the
saccaromycesian efficiency is). The logical conclusion is to quite literally cut out the middle man and engineer chemical structures which serve the
active ingredient directly (chlorophyll or luciferin or etc.), taking the byproducts for further processing, so we can combine them into *our*
infrastructure directly, rather than wasting it on the plant's infrastructure before we can use it.
Tim
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