Student uses black soldier flies to grow pea plants in simulated Martian soil | Hacker News Reader

Student uses black soldier flies to grow pea plants in simulated Martian soil

phys.org

177 pointsPaulHoule53 comments

Does simulated martian soil include all the perchlorates?

Don't think so.

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/22/1213643383/can-we-grow-veggie...

> Now, he's running an experiment growing English peas in simulated Martian soil at the Forensic Laboratory for Investigative Entomological Sciences (FLIES).

> "[This] Martian soil is manufactured on Earth. It uses data from Martian landers, and it's kind of expensive on a per-kilogram unit basis," Mendoza said, which limited the types of plants he could grow.

https://greenhouse.bios.uic.edu/news-stories/new-york-times-...

> “When they came to me and said, ‘Hey, we want to get Martian soil,’ I was like, ‘Where did you get Martian soil?’” he said. “They’re like, ‘Oh, no, we’ve got a supplier.’” It was the Martian Garden, a company based in Texas.

https://www.themartiangarden.com/tech-specs doesn't make any mention of perchlorate that I can see, even in the MDS sheets.

There are possibilities for removing and/or using the perchlorates as solid rocket propellant:

"Students Alex Hoganson, Hetal Rathore, and Chase Wernex used data from NASA's 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander to determine that Martian soil contains a 60/40 mix of calcium perchlorate and magnesium perchlorate. They worked under professor Steve Son at Zucrow Labs to synthesize and test a solid rocket propellant using that 60/40 mix as an oxidizer." [1][2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwD0a_VdS_4

[2] https://engineering.purdue.edu/ME/News/2022/can-we-turn-mart...

Yeah, it's a built-in easy source of oxygen for a base, too. Not all bad, but something to deal with.

There's a general principle for in-situ resource utilization that you want to eat the whole pig from the nose to the fingernails and twisty little tail.

As long as the extra equipment to do so isn’t prohibitive, at least.

Also depends what it is. In many situations (la Luna) volatiles are precious. I'm not so sure you want to harvest water from the Moon's north pole and use it to make fuel that will be consumed as opposed to maintaining an inventory for use in a circular economy.

I'm not sure what attitude about volatiles Martians would have. It might be able to support an atmosphere if the planet could be protected from solar radiation.

that was my first question too. but maybe the perchlorates can be easily broken down into oxygen and chlorides? plants can tolerate a lot of chlorides

It seems they already found a catalyst that could facilate reduction of perchlorates to chlorides with hydrogen in room temperature:

"This catalyst is much more active than any other chemical catalyst reported to date and reduces more than 99.99% of the perchlorate into chloride regardless of the initial perchlorate concentration"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210604122505.h...

I don't see anywhere mentioning that it doesn't. I think it's obvious to make the experiment realistic one should aim for a close enough analogue of the Martian soil, and that would include perchlorates.

Commercially available martian soil simulants don’t contain perchlorates. Trying to obtain perchlorates is problematic, both from the health and law enforcement point of view.

> Commercially available martian soil simulants don’t contain perchlorates.

How do you know?

Read the MDS sheets at https://www.themartiangarden.com/tech-specs

you can remove perchlorates with dissimilatory perchlorate reducing bacteria, by rinsing the soil, by thermal decomposition in the soil, etc. there are many paths to perchlorate free soil since it is very reactive and water soluble

They try to create a biological catalyst and remove perchlorates from soil using Bacillus Stearothermophilus. Genetically engineered bacterium in order to create chemical pathways and break a molecule which otherwise needs huge infrastructure and big machines and manpower to operate.

Biocatalysts like that also have the potential for desalination.

I thought the microorganism was called Basiliscus and uploaded a song to YT called Space Basiliscus. Now i see it has a different name. /facepalm

Perchlorates are highly soluble, aren't they? So, leech them out.

I anticipate growing things on Mars will be more like hydroponics than conventional agriculture. You're investing in a pressure vessel to contain the crops, so the cost per unit area is already quite high.

Aeroponics is probably a more realistic solution given the levels of water. As long as you could finely control the ratio of dissolved solids there's not much of a benefit for hydroponics perhaps beyond thermal insulation over aeroponics I think. I am not an expert though. Perhaps there's something I haven't considered though like external pressure for the plant's root vascular system provided by a hydroponics reservoir over aeroponics.

Soldier flies are amazing protein generating/converting factories, amenable to closed cycle modular environments. Ducks love them too.

I have been trying to find a paper for two decades on how daffodils mutate at a higher rate in cities to adapt. Could never find it again… hopefully my memory is not playing tricks on me.

Daffodils or dandelions?

https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/di...

Dandelions… my mistake.

If the suggestion of user cntr... didn't help, then try to have a 'dialogue' with Gemini or ChatGTP. I've used them before to re-discoverthings that I had partially forgotten (news articles, historical events, scientific papers, movies, songs' lyrics, etc.).

This article seems misleading. Is it just me?

"As a byproduct of digesting this biomatter, the black soldier fly larvae produce frass, which is essentially insect waste."

"Even with 0% frass, he saw flowering and pod growth in plants potted entirely in Martian soil."

"Mendoza found that exceeding anything greater than 50% frass would destroy the plant's ability to grow but adding 10% frass to the Martian soil was the optimum amount for plant growth."

There's no information on growth rate delta between 0% and 10%.

I expected this article to say that plants do not grow naturally in Martian soil, but that the frass provides sufficient nutrients for them to grow. Instead, I learned that plants do grow in natural (simulated?) Martian soil, that an amendment helps an undefined amount, but that too much of the amendment kills the plants. I didn't find that especially compelling.

Article is better titled: "Peas grow and bear fruit in unmodified Martian soil analog."

Or: "Student finds that adding crap to soil reduces plant growth".

I always thought the whole "can things grow on Mars" had the major impediments: A) no atmosphere, B) too cold, C) the regolith is full of perchlorates. A/B sure, set up a pressurized habitat. And if you're skipping C, then what's even the point of pretending.

It's not surprising that seeds need little more than moisture, earth-like atmosphere, and gentle heat to sprout. They contain all the nutrients and instructions required to start new life.

It's also not surprising that too much frass would inhibit growth. Even in earth-like soil, too much fertilizer is toxic.

But it's good to know that Mars-like soil doesn't inhibit plant growth.

This seems similar to soil amendment approaches like you can get from your local big box store. I wonder if it works the same way like Scott’s Lawn Soil.

But the plants would need to be in controlled atmosphere domes. Could any plant be genetically engineered to withstand the lack of atmospheric pressure?

Read this as “solder” and really walked away confused

That title is a real garden path sentence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

Picture a comma after the word "soldier" for a chuckle.

Reminiscent of "Let's eat grandma" vs "Let's eat, grandma".

With a comma there, it remains ambiguous (is "flies" a noun or a verb?) and even more perplexing.

It would mean "a black soldier and flies."

Think if "flies" is a noun in that formulation you'd put a semi colon or full stop in there and leave it to the reader to ponder if there actually is any connection between the dubious use of the soldier by the student and the ambitious experimentation by the flies...

I think it’s pretty unambiguously a verb in that case. That kind of comma is very commonly used in literary prose and essentially always is an “and” like conjunction that joins multiple actions together.

Or helping your uncle Jack off a horse.

What's correct there, commas before and after Jack?

Depends very much on the uncle's name and occupation, he may well be an equine veterinarian named Steve.

That avoids the worst ambiguity but you still might be helping Uncle Jack murder a horse.

Phrased like that, I suppose that the horse would prefer the uncommaed sentence.

Or you might be helping your uncle Jack by murdering a horse.

As in, assuming the grammar on "flies" is wrong and then misinterpreting it?

Otherwise I don't really see anywhere to go down the wrong path except for very small things like realizing a possible noun is an adjective on the very next word.

There's absolutely no grammatical error on the interpretation where the student is out hiring mercenaries to stop the flies' space colonization program.

Hydroponics shows that it's possible to grow most plants in water, no soil at all. So soil is by no means a requirement for plants to grow.

Source: Several Kratky method veggies growing on my balcony.

But don’t you also need to bring fertilizer with you? Also from what I remember you can’t really grow plans with wooded stalks, or at least not as easily as ones with all green stalks.

You would need some, but alot less than you might think. For my plants, about 3-5ml per litre of water is all thats needed.

Is there a KNF/JADAM hydro / aqua solution that would work?

NPK: Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium

From https://www.space.com/16903-mars-atmosphere-climate-weather.... :

> According to ESA, Mars' atmosphere is composed of 95.32% carbon dioxide, 2.7% nitrogen, 1.6% argon and 0.13% oxygen. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is 6.35 mbar which is over 100 times less Earth's. Humans therefore cannot breathe Martian air.

Lichen might grow in Martian soil and atmosphere.

"‘Fixed’ nitrogen found in martian soil" (2015) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.347.6229.1403-a :

> Now, in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the NASA Curiosity rover team reports detecting nitrates on Mars. ; nitric oxides

/? do plants consume protein? https://www.google.com/search?q=do+plants+consume+protein

Plants can use protein as a source of nitrogen.

"Plants can use protein as a nitrogen source without assistance from other organisms" (2008) https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0712078105

"Solein® transforms ancient microbes into the future of food" https://www.solein.com/blog/solein-transforms-ancient-microb... :

> In Solein's case, the bacteria oxidise hydrogen – a process involving the removal of electrons from the hydrogen molecules. This reaction releases energy, which the bacteria use to fix carbon dioxide, transforming it into organic compounds, including proteins.

"Scientists Just Accidentally Discovered a Process That Turns CO2 Directly Into Ethanol" (2024) https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-accidentally-di... :

> [...] Rondinone [@ORNL] and his colleagues had put together a catalyst using carbon, copper, and nitrogen, by embedding copper nanoparticles into nitrogen-laced carbon spikes measuring just 50-80 nanometres tall. (1 nanometre = one-millionth of a millimetre.)

> When they applied an electric current of just 1.2 volts, the catalyst converted a solution of CO2 dissolved in water into ethanol, with a yield of 63 percent.

Algae produce amino acids and proteins. Algae also use CO2 and Hydrogen to produce Omega-3 PUFAs, which are precursors to endocannabinoids.

FWIU Hydrogen Peroxide can flush aquarium tanks and Kratky systems. From watching YouTube, IDK about pool noodle polyethylene foam in the sun (solar radiation) instead of rockwool though

It's unsustainable unless we can produce the nutrients there

Plants mainly need light and CO₂ to grow.

But I assume they all need a few more elements to construct a real plant.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_nutrition and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labeling_of_fertilizer

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