Friday is here, and the 'A Taste of Science for the Weekend' segment is back - number 106.
And this time - on the extraordinary properties of soy, and how it transformed from food into aviation fuel, car tires, and plastic.
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Soy is familiar to us all from the food industry, where it provides plant-based protein and is predominantly used as animal feed in the meat industry. Soy also serves as a scaffold for cultivating lab-grown meat, and as a natural factory for producing various proteins through genetic engineering.
Soy possesses properties that make it a fascinating and exceptional plant. Soy plants produce about half of the fertilizer they need through a biological process. They maintain a symbiotic relationship with bacteria called *Rhizobium*, which capture nitrogen from the air and convert it into ammonia. Ammonia is a crucial fertilizer used by plants to synthesize amino acids and proteins. This trait allows soy to be cultivated with relatively low environmental pollution, although the cultivation of soy itself still sometimes leads to deforestation.
The soybean seed also features a unique survival mechanism: during dry periods, it uses carbohydrates to coat and protect the plant's proteins until re-exposure to a moist environment allows it to spring back to life. This discovery has led to patents utilizing this technique in medicine and agriculture.
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The soybean seed is relatively rich in oil, making it an excellent candidate for biofuel production. There are various methods for converting soy into fuel. It can be processed into fuel through a simple chemical reaction with alcohol, or hydrogen can be added at high temperature and pressure to create a fuel chemically identical to diesel. Soy-based fuel can also serve as aviation fuel for airplanes, which account for a significant percentage of air pollution today. The US Department of Agriculture has developed a method using iridium as a chemical catalyst to convert some of the soy molecules into aromatic (ring-shaped) structures. These molecules occur naturally in fossil fuels, and their presence is crucial because they allow for higher energy density by volume and cause less wear in jet engines.
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Even more ambitious developments utilize soy in the materials industry. The Goodyear company has developed car tires that rely on soybean oil. These tires are more resilient to low temperatures and provide improved road grip when driving in snow. Another innovation incorporates soybean oil into the plastic manufacturing process, where it neutralizes toxic acids released from the plastic upon heating. For this reason, it can be used to manufacture safer plastic containers for the food industry.
Since only about a fifth of the soybean is oil and the rest consists of proteins for the food industry, as this industry grows, the price for us as consumers will only continue to drop. The single aspect that still lacks a satisfactory solution is the deforestation driven by the planting of more and more soy fields.
Shabbat Shalom 😊
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss and my posts are not written by AI.
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