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"Eliminates" in the title seems to contradict the content of the article; the fungus converts organic mercury compounds into less-toxic inorganic compounds. I
by denton-scratch 4y ago
"Eliminates" in the title seems to contradict the content of the article; the fungus converts organic mercury compounds into less-toxic inorganic compounds.
I see this quite often. Recently I saw a claim that tiger worms can eliminate heavy metals from soil. How do they do that? Do they jump up, and spit the heavy metals onto the garden path? Turns out when you read the paper that the worms just concentrate the heavy metals; to eliminate them, you also have to sift the soil to remove the dead worms.
- vintermann 4y agoAnd the less toxic compound is apparently "volatile elemental mercury". Less toxic than dimethylmercury I suppose, but not exactly safe.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- dredmorbius 4y agoElemental sodium is a violently reactive metal that burns on contact with water. Molecular chlorine is lethal to pretty much all life. Sodium chloride, ordinary table salt, is a micronutrient mineral essential to pretty much all life. Mercury nudges a bit higher up the scale to "best to avoid contact", but the degree to which different sodium compounds are catastrophically lethal, and/or accumulate withing the food chain, differs tremendously.
- fabian2k 4y agoYou can't really get rid of elements in biological systems. So you can only transform the chemicals into a less harmful version or accumulate and store them somewhere where they can't do anything. Some organo-mercury compounds are dramatically more toxic than elemental mercury, so this is probably quite a bit better than just accumulating them and requiring another method to get rid of the accumulated waste. In soil it doesn't seem all that useful to accumulate toxic elements, in water I could imagine it being much easier to accumulate them into a non-soluble form that is not bio-available and can be removed much more easily.
- bell-cot 4y agoParagraphs 1 & 2: All too true. Paragraph 3: It sounds unclear whether the elemental mercury accumulates in the fungus, or in the soil, or mostly evaporates. If the fungus is dispersed through the soil, the practical difference between those is limited. The ability of the fungus to prevent uptake of mercury from contaminated soil (by some crops) might be extremely helpful to poor farmers. BUT - in the context of a water treatment facility, where you might filter contaminated water through a tightly-controlled bit of fungus-filled soil, then actual removal of the mercury seems more plausible. (Admitting that your end-product would probably be closer to "100,000X contaminated soil" than to "nice bottles of shiny stuff".)
- peteradio 4y agoUmm, no if you actually read the article you would know it transmutes the mercury into gold and diamonds.