Tomorrow’s Tech You Don’t Hear About — Yet

No SciFi prepared you for what’s really coming

1. Observing the Impossible

It started with a bit of a crime mystery.

In the mid-1980s, at the shores of the Oneida Lake, next to the town of Syracuse, NY, some geochemists were baffled: the manganese dioxide sludge at the bottom of the lake was somehow dissolving into the water — and fast. The chemists’ problem was, that manganese dioxide is, for all practical purposes, insoluble. So insoluble in fact, that it is inert even to most acids, unless heated. To dissolve like that, it must have, somehow, been reduced to a Mn(II) salt with the organic waste at the bottom of the lake — but it did so a thousand times too fast.

This is when they called a fellow called Ken Nealson. As a microbiologist, he recognized signs of life when he saw them. For him, the problem had a simple solution: some microbes must have been eating the organic matter, and reducing it with the manganese, instead of oxygen. They were “breathing” manganese.

The only problem was — according to all text books of the time, this was impossible. You see, in order for an organism to eat or breathe something, it first needs to absorb it through the cell membrane, because the chemical cycle that constitutes “breathing” — ATP production — happens inside the cell. To absorb a material through the cell membrane, it needs to be soluble. Which manganese oxide, as we know, is not.