Buy Chicken Wings By The Bulk

Short - 1,900 km to reach our tables. It will not be a bit 'too much?

Carry a part of an article of TigullioVino:

Al Gore in his book "An Inconvenient Truth" has included the purchase of local foods offered directly by the farmers in the list of things to do
to give a hand to save the earth from global warming.

"It has been estimated that an average meal travels more than 1,900 km per truck, ship, and / or air, before arriving on our table, so it's much more reasonable to buy foods that do not have all that way because it often takes more calories of energy to bring the meal to the consumer than the meal itself provide in terms of nutrition ".

An invitation, this Nobel Prize-Al Gore, to work to eat foods "km zero", ie products close to home, Coldiretti who wants to pick up strongly in defense of the local product to protect the environment, but also because of the new ethical sensibility that increasingly cittadinoconsumatore manifest when buying food.

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fuel termite

As you know, biofuels seem to be a viable and immediate solution to the energy problem on a global scale (mainly to replace existing fuels), but now it would create another, to be produced in sufficient quantities, is should cultivate such a large extension of land to be put in serious crisis the global food supply. In addition, these crops would be planted mainly in poor areas of the planet, the ones where the intensive use of agriculture has not yet saturated the area.
find other solutions to this urgent ethically correct in respect of those without an adequate nutritional sustenance. One possible solution comes from a study that uses the example of the system adopted by the termites to produce the energy needed to survive.
We report here the news given by the Science site.

The most serious problem posed by the development of the current generation of biofuels is that to obtain a good enzymatic conversion in ethanol's raw material, have to resort to agricultural resources which also have a food destination. To avoid this problem, which has already sparked bitter controversy, we are studying alternative processes that allow for the direct exploitation of cellulose, which is a matter of interest-free food. So far, however, the processes of this type have been identified quite complex and difficult to carry on an industrial scale.

A step in this direction, however, could come from termites. The intestines of these insects - which in many regions of the globe each year, causing damage worth billions of € - is divided into several compartments, which are housed in specific communities of microbes. Each of these colonies has the task of converting the polymers of wood into sugars that can then be fermented into fuel.

Now - as reported in an article published in "Nature" - an international group of biologists was able to sequence and analyze the genetic code of these microbes, taking a key step towards being able to reproduce what happens on an industrial scale, with great efficiency in the microscopic bioreactor that is the gut of the termite.

The researchers, in particular, have analyzed about 71 million "letters" of genetic code fibrobatteri (which degrade cellulose) and treponemes (which, through fermentation to convert sugars) extracts from the intestine of a colony of termites in Costa Rica

"In theory - observes Andreas Brune of the Max-Planck-Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology - bacteria with these termites could convert a sheet of A4 paper in two liters of hydrogen. "

To bring this process to industrial scale, said Eddy Rubin, director of Joint Genome Institute (JGI) of the Department of Energy, United States, "we must find the set of genes that have key functional attributes of the demolition cellulose, and this study was a crucial step in this journey. " (Dd )