Saturday, December 18, 2010

Awesome, cold plasma sterilizing and overly optimistic.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/cold-plasma-kills-bacteria-better-than-antibiotics.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1

Using cold plasmas, a state of matter where the ions are all torn up and everything is a bunch of ionizing radiation but at room temperature, allows one to use a flame at room temperature of ionizing radiation that manages to kill bacteria. So you could use such a thing on hands or directly on wounds and it'll work on antibiotic resistant bacteria quite well. However there's this odd point in the article where it somehow insists that bacteria can't evolve around it. Ahem? What? There are bacteria that can take super-lethal doses of radiation where their entire DNA is blown up into smithereens and they come out perfectly fine, slapping their DNA back together like an easy to solve jigsaw puzzle. Yes, it's a radically different way to kill bacteria, yes it is awesome. But, you could also have bacteria become resistant.to ionizing radiation, some are heavily resistant to nuclear bombs worth of radiation radiation. Sure, it might work well on some branches that can't adapt, but to say that nothing could adapt is a bit silly. We have bacteria around today that would survive rather easily on a few planets or moons in this solar system.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And I would think that should always be a factor that is thought of in the process of invention, or at least before it is used.