Teen's Biofuel Invention Turns Algae Into Fuel

And by that, I mean both the Tamba Bay and the Slashdot article. There is nothing anywhere about how she got the biodiesel from algae, which at this point is the only interesting thing about the experiment. It mentions photoautotrophic cultivation, which just means that the algae use light to grow, which is a big no-shit-Sherlock. It mentions osmotic sonication, which is a fancy word for using sound waves and osmotic principles to get the detergent into the cell innards. Google searches turn up no indication of how the experiment was set up, what the actual results or anything of interest. The best thing I got was a list of who else won what other categories at the fair.

So we have two utterly known principles being applied to biodiesel generation from algae, and somehow this makes news as a breakthrough. Yawn.

Which leads me to my second rant: the insistence of news organizations to hail science fair winners as geniuses who solved a problem no one else could (I'm specifically looking at the stories about the kid arranging solar cells in a tree shape). It completely oversells the experiment, turns the kid into something they're not, and covers up the actual interesting item: that you can do cool science in your home that goes beyond baking powder volcanoes. It could even be science that is relevant to an existing topic of interest to actual scientists, which should put the kids on a good trajectory to actually solving the problem. But no, instead we are presented with kid geniuses who solve world hunger, and I get to fend off all kinds of dumb questions and comments about science, the state of technology and why we're not listening more to kids.

Now get off my lawn.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/34PkMUaX66s/story01.htm

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