Good morning.
It’s a partly sunny day for Whitewater today, with highs in the lower eighties.
The key to alternative fuels from plants may be microbes like those in pandas’ stomachs. That’s because Pooping Pandas May Make Better Biofuels:
“We’re taking refuse — panda poop and the microbes that live there — and trying to break down another form of refuse,” says Ashli Brown, a biochemist at Mississippi State University. Brown described her team’s results on August 29 at a meeting in Denver of the American Chemical Society.
Pandas eat bamboo almost exclusively, but don’t have a multichambered stomach like cows to help digest all those plants. It’s basically in one end and out the other, and “anything residing there to break down woody material has to be very efficient,” says Candace Williams, a graduate student on Brown’s team.
Here’s one of the Memphis Zoo pandas that were the particular subject of the study: