Well, this is better than using them to line birdcases or wrap fishes:
The Internet is delivering a slow death to newspapers, but many of us still have piles of the stuff around the house that a microbe called TU-103 will convert to butanol, a biofuel that is nearly as energy dense as unleaded gasoline.
"This is a bacterium that we isolated straight out of nature," David Mullin, a cell and molecular biologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, told me today.
In fact, it was isolated from a truckload of feces he and colleagues collected from grass-eating animals at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, figuring their intestinal tracts likely harbored a naturally occurring microbe that had the qualities they sought.
They were looking for a microbe that produces butanol from cellulose — a woody, fibrous material in plants — rather than more expensive sugars and starches, as well as one that does this in the presence of oxygen.
Man, I've got about a year's worth of fuel in my attic alone. Feces plus newspapers. Joke sort of writes itself, doesn't it?
