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Alcohol is not cleaner than gasoline

12.11.2007

Even Henry Ford in 1925 said that the automobile fuel of the future is ethyl alcohol.

Ethanol, unlike gasoline, is a renewable resource, as it can be obtained from plant biomass. And for the first models of Ford cars, both gasoline and alcohol, or any mixture of them, were suitable. Now many cars in Brazil run on pure alcohol or its mixture with gasoline.

But is this replacement good from an environmental point of view? Mark Jacobson, a meteorologist at Stanford University (USA), considered this issue based on the assumption that by 2020 US roads will be dominated by cars running on a mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline.

A computer model showed that the number of cases of asthma will increase by 4-9% in the country. The fact is that there is more formaldehyde and acetaldehyde in the combustion products of alcohol than in the combustion products of gasoline. In addition, these aldehydes have carcinogenic properties. But the gasoline engine emits more other carcinogens - butadiene and benzene than alcohol.

So, in any case, a noticeable improvement in air purity when switching from gasoline to alcohol is not to be expected.

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Cancer affects not only humans but also animals. But everything is different - someone more often, someone less often. There are species that are especially resistant to cancer, and these, oddly enough, include the largest mammals: elephants and whales. Why "oddly enough"? We know that cancer starts with cells that have lost control of division. Obviously, the more cells in the body, the greater the chance that something will go wrong in one of them - during division, for example, an error can creep into the synthesized DNA chain. However, elephants, despite their size and long lifespan, get cancer even less often than smaller species. This paradox has been called the Peto paradox, after Richard Peto, a British epidemiologist at Oxford who noticed it back in the 1970s.

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Genome analysis has shown that African elephants have as many as 40 copies of the p53 gene, while Asian elephants have between 30 and 40. This gene is one of the best known anti-oncogenes. The p53 protein recognizes damage in DNA, and if there are enough of them, it turns on the genes responsible for apoptosis - programmed cell suicide. A large amount of genetic damage makes the cell dangerous for the whole organism, so the easiest way is to get rid of it altogether. Obviously, it is the huge number of copies of p53 that arose in their genome millions of years ago that helps elephants avoid cancer (humans, by the way, have only two copies of p53).

You can, of course, do otherwise - try to repair damaged DNA, however, when elephant cells were irradiated with ionizing radiation, no activation of DNA-repair genes and proteins was observed, but the cells began to actively die. That is, the elephantine way to avoid a malignant tumor is to simply kill the spoiled cell in time. One has only to regret that evolution could not provide our genome with an extra dozen copies of p53; perhaps in the future, biotechnology will allow such an operation to be performed, and new people will be born with increased protection against cancer.

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