Two stories in Popular Science magazine caught our eyes this week.  We think  you’ll enjoy our spin on them…

Green is in our blood

The first story, “Carbon Captured” summarizes an amazing characteristic of human blood that may end up helping to capture CO2 from coal plants for later containment (rather than emission).  It turns out that the enzyme carbonic anhydrase turns CO2 into bicarbonate. A company called Carbozyme is testing a system that consists of millions of tiny tubes coated with a synthesized version of the enzyme.  When the gasses from a coal plant pass through these tubes, the CO2 is isolated so that it can be pumped and sequestered.  Normally, the chemicals used to do this work are – you may have guessed it – hazardous themselves.  This system avoids those hazards.  A pilot project (note that key word: project) is planned in 2010 at the University of North Dakota, and if that pilot goes well, the company will be able to license the technology worldwide.  So you see?  We told you that “green” was in your blood – and now there’s scientific proof!  Here’s a little more on this from Fast Company magazine…

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Getting lean from fat

The second story,”Extreme Makeover”,  is a highly personal story of recycling.  Extremely.  It seems that one of the obvious waste products of liposuction – body fat cells – given the right set of genetic signals, can transform themselves into pluripotent stem cells – that is cells that have the ability to become almost any other type of cell – for use in the same patient, for example.  Indeed, when the team of scientists from Stanford working on this project (yep – there it is again - the word project) used fat cells, it turned out they were converted into pluripotent stem cells in 20 days instead of the 8 weeks it takes for the traditional skin cells which are used.  Not only that, the fat cells generated 20 times the number of stem cells as skin cells could.  Another benefit is that if cells are taken from Patient A and used in Patient A, the chance of immune rejection is eliminated.  So that’s what we meant when we said it was an extremely personal form of recycling.  Here’s the point: the researchers were so used to disposing of the fat from liposuction that according to Dr. Joseph Wu, one of the researchers working on this project, the idea of using fat cells simply “never crossed my mind”, even though they are an abundant medical resource.  It’s that long-term (and ironically) lean thinking we’ve been talking about at EarthPM.  What use do these ‘wastes’ from a process have?  As a PM, think about fat.  It’s not that it just has to be trimmed – it can be put to work, as in this case!