New Billionaires tune - " Eat 👏 Our 👏Trash👏!!!:
The process takes ~2 days, costs ~$60/kg, and can’t scale to the 400 million tonnes of plastic waste produced annually. Jason Hallett of Imperial College London: “There’s no way you could do this commercially. We’re not gonna be eating plastic cookies.”
Nobody has even had the courage to taste one.
It’s all hat and no cattle.
So they wrote this absurd article just for the thrill of getting everyone upset?
Yup. Now rage baiting isn’t just on Facebook, reddit and twitter.
Thanks to Rage Bait Inc (LLC) franchising opportunities , now all the social networks can present clueless false information framed in such a way to anger the public and generate angry clicks.
Sign up today and you too can profit from the Enshittification of the internet.
All hat and no cattle. I have never heard that expression. I’ll be looking that up
Outside of the US that expression is rare as rocking horse shit.
Rocking horse shit. I have never heard that expression. I’ll be looking that up
It’s all hat and no cattle.
Is that a cowboy proverb?
Yes, and not to be confused with, “Well,Yippie-Ki-Yay MotherFucker!”
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yippee+ki-yay%2C+motherfucker!
It’s not as bad as it sounds. PET plastic has the same atoms as sugar, so it’s matter of reorganising it.
The researchers engineered an yeast that eats plastic and “ferments” it into sugar
This is actually a huge step in the direction of star trek food replicators.
Always thought that would be graphene with nano robotics.
NileRed on YouTube has done a few interesting things like turning plastic gloves into hot sauce through different chemical processes.
It’s more of a fun science demonstration than anything meant to be even remotely practical to create food from waste, and there are some pretty nasty chemicals involved in some of them that really have no business being anywhere near food
But it does I think drive home the point that everything is basically made out of the same stuff and it’s a matter of figuring out how to break it down and put it back together in the right way to be useful.
The alchemists were right, they just focused on the wrong area of the periodic table. We can’t turn lead into gold, but we can turn plastic into mouthwatering hamburgers!
We’ve so far turned lead into gold 2 times
It’s just so expensive it’s not worth doing except to see if you can
It’s also weirdly easiest to turn things much more radioactive but further away into gold, such as Osmium, but the gold that it produces is radioactive
steamed hams you say?
It’s an old family recipe.
I thought we were having plastic bottles
Pressed hams
Actually we can turn lead into gold by shooting it with particle accelerators. It is not profitable though.
You can turn lead into gold; it was something that was demonstrated in my HS science class. It’s just that the chemical used to make the change is far more valuable than the gold you get out of the process.
We actually can turn lead into gold and fairly easily now, it’s just that it would cost you billions of dollars to make pennies worth of gold.
People really need to stop writing about the torment nexus because all it’s doing is giving the oligarchs more ideas…
The researchers on this one are convinced they can eat the cookies. And while scientists underestimating personal risks isn’t unheard of (hence why they need university approval), it means there isn’t anything obviously dangerous with this process.
But it does I think drive home the point that everything is basically made out of the same stuff and it’s a matter of figuring out how to break it down and put it back together in the right way to be useful.
One step closer to my favorite utopia, Gay Space Communism* (replicators).
* coined by rightwing chuds, but I really like this term.
Sodium and chlorine are the same atoms in table salt. Not gonna have them by themselves.
Yes, but if you feed the pure sodium and chlorine into any process that outputs pure NaCL it’s exactly the same as any other table salt. Same with PET and sugar, if yeast turns the PET into 100% sugar it’s not different from any other sugar.
The problem with this is “pure”. Almost no chemical process results in pure output on its own, there usually needs to be a shitton of cleaning and refining afterwards, see Nile{Red,Blue}.
Assuming the yeast gets all of it and there isn’t any left, sure.
But hey, I’m sure we can trust the proccesed food industry to have our best interests at heart.
It’s not as bad as it sounds.
Still, a new dystopian scifi trope is born. Can’t wait to see it in action: “ingredients: 50% PET bottle sugar, 40% insect protein, <10% human excrement, flavor, coloring”
By the way the article and researchers describe it this is going to target rich people that want to feel they are doing something for the environment, while keeping all their habits (kind of like lab grown meat).
Mmm, the terephthalate adds extra crunch
Soylent Green is plastic!
I mean, it’s not a bad idea, we certainly have enough of the stuff
Where else are you gonna get your recommended daily allowance of Vitamin P while in space?
It’s Carbohydrates all the way. Always has been 🔫
Bold of you to assume you’ll be able to afford the plastic bottle cookies, peasant!
Turning old plastic into food? I’ve seen this one before!
i love when left wing progessive lemmys loop around and turn into hard right conspiracy theorists
this also isn’t a meme, does this comm have any moderators?
Lemmy is just awful about reacting only to the headlines, especially with popsci reporting. The above referenced work is kick ass - converting one of the most common garbage plastics into sugar with a bioengineered yeast is cool as hell. sure it’s a headline born of the petite dystopia we live in, but it’s a really optimistic breakthrough and not at all a dystopian thing in itself.
Lemmy is just awful about reacting only to the headlines
That’s pretty much normal all over the internet. It’s a bad human behaviour heavily exploited via attention economics, of course such bad traits get reinforced. Staying in one place and thinking gets disincentivised (you might even put down your phone! Outrageous!!) and outright punished through dark patterns and antifeatures, faster scrolling and high frequency interaction with populistic takes is being rewarded with shiny stuff on your profile, Karma, hearts, stars etc.
In this instance people are talking about “the article” and there isn’t even an article LOL. Lots of lemmers devoutly believe they’re better than the rest of the world - whether it’s because of their ethical purity or neurodivergence or whatever.
I remember seeing the youtuber NileRed doing similar experiments:
Making grape soda from disposable vinyl gloves.
Turning paint thinner into cherry soda
Making hotsauce from plastic gloves
My first thought was “Hey we’re one step closer to Star Trek replicators.” :D
Yep, a lot of people jumping to conclusions from the get go. And I agree, bioengineering is really cool stuff.
At the times it take to make these, I bet there will not be much left of the PET molecule structure.
I miss the times when outrage food was made of bugs 😔
Cyberpunk is cumming
Blood bricks
