The Hole Story the Quest to Sequence a Human Genome in 15 Minutes
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The many uses of Making electronics Who’s jamming bioluminescence bend and stretch your satnav? TechnologyQuarterly March 12th 2011 The hole story The quest to sequence a human genome in 15 minutes TQCOV-March12-2011.indd 1 01/03/2011 13:37 The Economist Technology Quarterly March 12th 2011 Monitor 1 C ontents On the cover Feeding strands of DNA through tiny holes, called nanopores, and reading o the genetic letters one at a time could make the process of genomic sequencing much quicker and cheaper. This would have momentous implications for genetic Rkoc s on the menu analysis and medical treatment: page 9 Monitor 1 Rock•eating bugs, robots that rescue soldiers, anti•theft tags, beaming power by laser, more elegant pylons, the erosion of Biotechnology: High commodity prices have encouraged the use of online anonymity, a camera mineral•munching bugs to extract metals from waste or low•grade ore that sees round corners, an exoskeleton for paraplegics, VEN the sleekest gadget depends on the ores and mining wastes with low metal the internet•addiction debate, Emucky business of digging stu out of concentrations. It is also generally cleaner. and an invitation to nominate the ground. Mobile phones and comput• Material containing poisonous elements innovators for our awards ers use copper for their wiring and rely on such as arsenic is unsuitable for smelting cobalt, germanium, lithium, nickel, plati• because of the risk of pollution. num and tantalum for other components. For many years bioleaching has been Di erence engine Electric motors need magnets made of used to recover gold from ores that are 8 Renumbering the net rare earth elements such as neodymi• hard to break down using heat treatment We’ve run out of internet um. But rising metal prices and China’s (known as roasting). The bacteria are set addresses. What happens now? tightening grip on supplies of rare•earth to work in huge stirred tanks, called bio• elements (it accounts for 97% of produc• reactors, containing ground•up rocks and Nanopore sequencing tion), have heightened the appeal of nd• dilute sulphuric acid. The bacteria change 9 The hole story ing other sources of supply. The result is one form of iron found within the ore Towards the 15•minute genome growing interest in the use of rock•eating (ferrous iron) to another (ferric iron) and bacteria to extract metals from low•grade tap the energy released. In acidic solutions Stretchable electronics ores, mining waste or industrial euent. ferric iron is a powerful oxidising agent. It 11 Flexible strategies Rock•eating bacteria such as Acidithio• breaks down sulphide minerals and re• Making circuits stretch and bend bacillus and Leptospirillum are naturally leases any associated metals. occurring organisms that thrive in nasty, In the past it has been hard to recover Inside story acidic environments. They obtain energy metals other than gold protably in this from chemical reactions with sulphides, way. But high commodity prices mean 13 Exploiting bioluminescence Living light has many uses in and can thus accelerate the breakdown of that bioleaching of a variety of metals has medicine, warfare and even food minerals. Base metals such as iron, copper, become an attractive prospect in recent zinc and cobalt occur widely as sulphides, years. In 2008, for example, a new venture and more valuable metals such as gold started operating in Talvivaara, Finland. It GPS jamming and uranium are also present in the same was set up as the result of a European 16 Don’t block my satnav bodies of ore. With a little help from the research project called BioShale, which How to keep jammers at bay mineral•munchers, these metals can be showed that bacteria could recover nickel, released in a process called bioleaching. copper, lead, silver, zinc, cobalt, rhenium, Brain scan This approach has its pros and cons. To selenium, tin, gold, platinum, palladium 18 Betting on green recover large quantities of metals quickly and uranium from Europe’s extensive but A prole of Vinod Khosla, who is from ores with a high metal content, underexploited black shale deposits. taking a risky clean•tech gamble smelting remains the most protable Last year the Talvivaara Mining Company route. Bioleaching is slower, but it is also produced over 10,000 tonnes of nickel cheaper, making it well•suited for treating and 25,000 tonnes of zinc from local 1 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly March 12th 2011 2 shales, and it plans to deliver 90,000 tonnes of zinc, 1,800 tonnes of cobalt and 15,000 tonnes of copper a year by 2012. In 2010 the rm started to extract uranium, Caught in a BEAR hug and expects to produce 350 tonnes a year. Other metals may follow. In Chile, which has 30% of the world’s copper deposits, BHP Billiton, a mining giant, has set up two bioleaching oper• R obotics: A newly designed robot can recover casualties from battleelds, ations in the past three years, each aiming and might also be able to make itself useful to soldiers in other ways for around 200,000 tonnes of copper production a year. The Finnish and Chil• ILLING a soldier removes one enemy design a general•purpose robot. ean ventures both use bioheaps, which Kfrom the fray. Wounding him removes The BEAR’s operator can control the are vast, carefully engineered piles of three: the victim and the two who have to robot in two ways. One, a joystick, can be ground•up ore (in Chile, 2,000 metres carry him from the battleeld. That cyni• embedded into the grip of a rie and long, over 100 metres wide and nearly 20 cal calculation lies behind the design of manoeuvred by the soldier’s ngertip metres high), irrigated from above with many weapons that are intended to inca• when he is holding his weapon to his dilute sulphuric acid laced with bacterial pacitate rather than annihilate. But robot• shoulder. The advantage of this is that he cultures, and aerated from below. Using ics may change the equation. does not need to put his gun down to many di erent organisms within the The Battleeld Extraction•Assist Robot, rescue his comrades. The other means of heaps gives the best results, says Barrie or BEAR for short, is, in the words of Gary control, a special glove designed by An• Johnson, a researcher at the University of Gilbert of the United States Army’s Tele• throTronix, another Maryland rm, can Bangor in North Wales, who has been medicine and Advanced Technology sense the wearer’s hand movements and working on bioleaching with Rio Tinto, Research Centre (TATRC), a highly agile direct the BEAR accordingly. If, for ex• another mining giant. We nd one ore and powerful mobile robot capable of ample, the gloved hand moves to the left, type will suit one consortium of organ• lifting and carrying a combat casualty the robot will follow. If the hand moves isms, and another might be better with a from a hazardous area across uneven backwards, the robot will slow down or di erent mixture, he says. terrain. When it is not saving lives, it can stop. If the glove’s wearer closes his st, Meanwhile a Canadian rm, BacTech perform dicult and repetitive tasks, such the robot takes that as an instruction to Mining Corporation, which sells a bio• as loading and unloading ammunition. grip an object with its arms. leaching process for gold extraction, has The current prototype BEAR is a small, Over the past year BEAR has been set up a new division to apply the tech• tracked vehicle with two hydraulic arms tested at the army’s Infantry Centre nology to mining waste. At the town of and a set of video cameras that provide a Manoeuvre Battle Laboratory in Fort Cobalt in Canada it plans to remove toxic view of its surroundings to its operator via Benning, Georgia. It has shown that it can elements such as arsenic from old silver• a wireless link. It has been developed by travel at around 12mph (19kph) across a at mine tailings and extract cobalt, nickel and TATRC in collaboration with Vecna Tech• surface. It can also move over soil, sand silver. First and foremost, we are trying to nologies, a company based in Maryland and gravel, through trees and inside build• remediate the environment, explains that invented the robot. Daniel Theobald, ings, albeit at lower speeds. Several more Paul Miller, vice•president of engineering BEAR’s inventor and Vecna’s boss, says years of tests are planned (this is the army, at BacTech. But by doing that, we also versatility is at the heart of the robot’s after all), but Dr Gilbert is optimistic that hope to recover valuable metals. design. It would be completely impracti• BEAR will come through them. If it does, Metals can also be extracted from cal if you had robots with a sole duty to soldiers will be able to get on with their polluted water. Water sources near dis• rescue soldiers, because they would primary job of killing the enemy, without used mines are often contaminated, as spend most of their time unused, he says. having to worry so much about what the water drains through old waste dumps. In The whole idea from the start was to enemy has done to their friends. 7 Germany a rm called GEOS has set up a pilot plant on a coal•mining site to clean the iron•laced groundwater using bacteria. Organisms with slightly di erent dietary preferences, known as sulphur• reducing bacteria, show promise for re• moving dissolved metals from liquid industrial waste.