This just in: Pissing in the ocean could actually help save the planet!

[thatcrazycajun]

Wired magazine's website lists this year's "10 Craziest Ways to Hack the Earth." One of them is ocean fertilization: the addition of nutrients such as iron and urea (a key component of human urine) to help grow more CO2-scrubbing plankton. Of course, topping the list is "The Status Quo"—that is, continuing to pump out greenhouse gases, overload landfills, clear-cut forests etc.

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WAY More Familiar with Urea than I'd like to be . . .

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

Urea.

It's nasty stuff: It dries out of solution to a crusty pipeclogging mess, and 24 hours after you dissolve it, it degrades to something else (whose name escapes me at the moment) that's even worse.

BUT! urea is capable of unfolding proteins from their native conformations, so we make several liters of it when we want to purify our various histone proteins. Once we make the urea into solution, we have only 24 hours to:

1) Fill up our chromatography columns (sometimes over 300 milliliters at a flowrate no more than 2 mls per minute),

2) Denature our histone protein, load it on the column, and run it through hoping that it comes out at a different time than its contaminants,

3) Find out what time our protein came out, consolidate those fractions of the column outflow, and get the protein OUT of the urea solution (using dialysis), and

4) Push the urea solution out of the chromatography column and the pumps and tubing supplying it, replacing it with a cleaner, gentler buffer solution.

It makes for VERY long workdays.

At least, when we pour our expired leftover solutions down the sink, which (I'm told) flows into the Olentangy River, which flows into the Scioto River, which flows into the Ohio then into the Mississippi, I guess I'm doing the Gulf of Mexico some good.

The replacement 5-kilogram pail should be arriving from Sigma-Aldrich Chemical Co. tomorrow or so.