Perhaps a swirl of cyano for flavor...

March 5, 2020 10:58 AM

Cyanobacteria—colloquially called blue-green algae—can produce oil from water and carbon dioxide with the help of light...
posted by jim in austin (6 comments total)

Or chocolate!
posted by aeshnid at 11:48 AM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

I read that as Cyranobacteria - long nose, flashy blade, ready with a clever quip....
posted by BWA at 11:57 AM on March 5, 2020 [4 favorites]

Actually this makes sense. Apparently all the chloroplasts in green plants evolved from once free-floating cyanobacteria. They entered into a symbiotic relationship, not unlike lichens which are a combination of fungus with algae and/or cyanobacteria...
posted by jim in austin at 11:58 AM on March 5, 2020

In the totally nuts 90's book The Millennial Project, Marshall Savage proposes a somewhat grandiose plan to build floating cities! Then build space stations! Then colonize the moon! Then colonize Mars! Then expand out and take over the galaxy!
Every stage of the project has everyone eating spirulina burgers. He's obsessed.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 1:02 PM on March 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is a terrible article. Algal biofuels have been a thing since the 70s. What the Bonn group did was find two new enzymes in a strain of algae that might help make longer-chain, higher energy density algal biofuel production more efficient. The article is blowing up their results to an extent that makes it seem like they invented the field. This does their (excellent) work a disservice, as well as negating all of hard work a generation of biofuel scientists have done to get biofuels to the point where it's predicted to be a $10B market by 2025. Seriously, an even slightly competent reporter could have spent 5 minutes googling to see what the current state of the art was. Clickbait
posted by overhauser at 8:06 AM on March 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

overhauser: The article was about cyanobacteria, not algae. Definitely not the same thing. And I don't believe phys.org participates much in clickbait. The article was posted by the University of Bonn on behalf of their researchers...
posted by jim in austin at 2:20 PM on March 6, 2020