The clay shards and pottery in TP What & Why?

[Michaelangelica]

What is the relationship between pottery and CO2?

Some radom quotes from the web; interesting?

Toshiba Group Announces Breakthrough in CO2 Absorbing Ceramics -

CO2 Absorbing Ceramics
Tokyo, June 24, 2003 - (JCN Newswire) - Toshiba Corporation (TSE: 6502) and Toshiba Ceramics Co., Ltd. (TSE: 5213), a leading producer of ceramic materials, today announced a major step forward in the environmental protection, a lithium-silicate based ceramic material with exceptional carbon dioxide (CO2) absorption characteristics.
The new material can absorb 400 times its own volume of CO2 at an unmatched rate of absorption, and can do so at room temperature.

Toshiba Group Announces Breakthrough in CO2 Absorbing Ceramics

Fabrication of Microcellular Ceramics Using Gaseous Carbon Dioxide
Young-Wook Kim, et al

Supported by the Center for Advanced Materials Processing (21C Frontier R&D Program of Korean Ministry of Science and Technology) under Grant No. PM003-00-01 and the Korea Research Foundation under Grant No. KRF-2002-013-E00094.
*Member, American Ceramic Society.
KEYWORDS
fabrication • polycarbosilane • pyrolysis
ABSTRACT
A microcellular ceramic with cell densities >109 cells/cm3 and cells <10 μm was made with a preceramic mixture of polycarbosilane and polysiloxane.
The preceramic compact was saturated with gaseous CO2, a large number of cells were nucleated and grown by using a thermodynamic instability induced by a rapid pressure drop, and the microcellular preceramic was transformed into a microcellular ceramic by pyrolysis.

Wiley InterScience :: Session Cookies

A site all about pottery & clay
Pottery and Ceramics Magic

This gas (CO2) is utilized by many types of industry including breweries, mining ore, and manufacturing of carbonated drinks, drugs, disinfectants, pottery, and baking powder (NIOSH 1976).

http://www.blm.gov/pgdata/etc/medial...dat/25apxC.pdf
How is CO2 used in pottery? Is it in the pottery/clay?

Is this relvant or from too far left-field? Some bacteria like clay??. A chemist to translate please?

Clay - prion protein interactions
L. CHARLET, C. HUREAU AND Y. CHAPRON
Environmental Geochemistry Group, LGIT-OSUG, University
of Grenoble, BP 53, F-38041 Grenoble, Cedex 9, France

The prion protein (PrP) is the key protein implicated in the development of scrapie, a sheep- and goat-specific
transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. The N-terminal tail of the protein includes five copper chelating sites as well as numerous positively charged amino acids, which all may induce a binding of the protein to clay minerals, as shown,
e.g., by molecular dynamics (MD) calculations and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy.

The C-terminal part of the protein has a hydrophobic core that may also interact with low-charge clay surfaces as well as organic matter.

The speciation of Cu-PrP chelates changes upon
adsorption on clay minerals. Cu coordination at a given pH in the adsorbed state is similar to Cu coordination in a solution of lower pH.
This, together with high available Mn2+ concentrations, favors the exchange of Mn2+ for Cu2+, which is shown by MD to occur in three steps, and may lead to the PrPc to the pathogenic PrPSc transformation.

[mavrickjohn]

Interesting stuff there. Does any one have a chemical breakdown of the clay shards found in Terra Preta? Or does any one have some actual shards that could be analyzed by a ceramic chemist?
The other part of your post is very interesting about Prions. I did a search on Prions and found this. Prion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For the bird, see Prion (bird). For the theoretical subatomic particle, see Preon.
Prion Diseases (TSEs)
Classification and external resources
ICD-10
A81
ICD-9
046
A prion (pronounced /ˈpriː.ɒn/*( listen)[1]) is an infectious agent that is composed of protein. To date, all such agents that have been discovered propagate by transmitting a mis-folded protein state; the protein itself does not self-replicate and the process is dependent on the presence of the polypeptide in the host organism.[2] The mis-folded form of the prion protein has been implicated in a number of diseases in a variety of mammals, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as "mad cow disease") in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. All known prion diseases affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue, and all are currently untreatable and are always fatal.[3] In general usage, prion refers to the theoretical unit of infection. In scientific notation, PrPC refers to the endogenous form of prion protein (PrP), which is found in a multitude of tissues, while PrPSC refers to the misfolded form of PrP, that is responsible for the formation of amyloid plaques that lead to neurodegeneration.
Prions are hypothesized to infect and propagate by refolding abnormally into a structure which is able to convert normal molecules of the protein into the abnormally structured form. All known prions induce the formation of an amyloid fold, in which the protein polymerises into an aggregate consisting of tightly packed beta sheets. This altered structure is extremely stable and accumulates in infected tissue, causing tissue damage and cell death.[4] This stability means that prions are resistant to denaturation by chemical and physical agents, making disposal and containment of these particles difficult.
Proteins showing prion-type behavior are also found in some fungi and this has been important in helping to understand mammalian prions. However, fungal prions do not appear to cause disease in their hosts and may even confer an evolutionary advantage through a form of protein-based inheritance.[5]
The word prion is a compound word derived from the initial letters of the words proteinaceous and infectious, with -on added by analogy to the word virion.[6]


What I find interesting is the proteins showing prion-type behavior found in some fungi. Perhaps the clay shards helped the fungi that are unique to Terra preta exist in the charcoal environment and might explain why the fungi present are so wide spread through out the range of know TP sites. It might also explain why these fungi are unique to TP.

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by mavrickjohn

Interesting stuff there. Does any one have a chemical breakdown of the clay shards found in Terra Preta? Or does any one have some actual shards that could be analyzed by a ceramic chemist?
. . .
Proteins showing prion-type behavior are also found in some fungi and this has been important in helping to understand mammalian prions. However, fungal prions do not appear to cause disease in their hosts and may even confer an evolutionary advantage through a form of protein-based inheritance.[5]
. . .


What I find interesting is the proteins showing prion-type behavior found in some fungi. Perhaps the clay shards helped the fungi that are unique to Terra preta exist in the charcoal environment and might explain why the fungi present are so wide spread through out the range of know TP sites. It might also explain why these fungi are unique to TP.

I met a guy from Cornell Uni who was looking at the possibility of a unique set of micro/flora/fauna from Brazillian Terra preta soils. Apparently reserach on this is very difficult as so many 'wee beasties' are interdependent, refuse to grow on petrie dishes in labs, and in other ways refuse to co-operate. This combined with the Brazillian's fear that the Yanks will discover something in their soils and patent it -and so are reluctant to see TP soils leave the country-- makes this a hard area of research. However i think it is the one that will give most joy in the end. Already there has been a marked shift of emphasis in agriculture to looking at soil microflora. For example the discovery of glomalin is recent.
You might like to browse though the Cornell Uni site to see if anything new has ben done/ posted/ written in this area.

I have not seen any chemical analysis of the TP pottery. (If i have i have forgotten it)!

There is likely to be something going on here isn't there?
It seems tantalisingly out of reach at the moment