I don’t know how to ease you into this so I’m just going to come right out and say
it; fish jizz is awesome.
Hey there fish sticks, Julian here for DNews.
Scientists are an innovative bunch, and a lot of great advances come from finding solutions
in creative ways.
Well scientists in Japan are getting mighty creative because they’ve proposed a way
to recycle electronic waste with, wait for it…
Salmon sperm.
You see a crucial component of the high tech world are rare earth elements.
They are the entire lanthanides group along with scandium and yttrium, making 17 elements
total.
They’re used sparingly in electronics but they’re crucial to their performance.
The Apple iPhone uses 8 rare earth elements that make the screen, the speakers, and the
circuit miniaturization possible.
And like anything else, it’s better to recycle them than to dig them up anew every time the
next iphone version comes out and everyone throws last year’s model in a landfill.
So in a great example of thinking outside the box, Yoshio Takahashi and his research
team are looking inside the lox.
As it turns out ions of Rare Earth Elements bond to the phosphate groups that, along with
a sugar called deoxyribose, make up the spines of the DNA double helix.
Takahashi’s team wanted to see if they could use DNA in water to extract these metals and
Salmon sperm happens to be ideal.
It’s not water soluble, it’s cheap, and as anyone who’s seen CSI will tell you,
semen is just silly with DNA.
Takahashi’s team tested the idea by mixing powdered fish splooge with a solution of neodymium,
dysprosium and trivalent iron.
Once the rare earth elements bonded to the baby batter, it’s a simple matter of running
it all through acid and a centrifuge to isolate the elements again.
Amazingly this is not the first time fish’s swimmers have been used for science.
Salmon DNA has been used to shape silver nanoparticles for use in optical data storage.
Herring dna has been tested as a way to fireproof cotton.
And fish DNA has been used for decades in molecular biology for detecting specific dna
sequences in a technique called Southern blotting.
And yet with all these uses, the Japanese fishing industry still throws out tons of
the sticky stuff every year.
Which raises an important question; who is beating off all these fish???
You’d think with the amount of pre-Nemos fish make, fish populations would be exploding.
But that’s not the case.
Trace explains the problem in a much more mature video over here.
Absurd science stories like this absolutely make my day.
If you have a favorite example of weird science, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Until next time, thanks for watching DNews.