Uniformed journalists.

If only wood could be converted to biofuels, there would be no need to wait a million years for the trees to be buried and become oil. Wood is indeed convertible to useful chemicals, because termites do it every day, causing $1 billion of damage every year in the United States.

It's no trick to turn wood into biofuel, it is biofuel. For most of the world it is the primary biofuel. What this dullard may mean is that he doesn't know how to turn wood into liquid fuel for transportation. But that too is known technology - just heat it up in an oxygen free container. This yields all sorts of gases which we know how to crack and combine in various ways to make all sorts of chemicals including liquid fuel for transportation. The residue of this process is chared carbon - biochar - which can be used as a stable soil amendment that sequesters carbon while improving soil.

But to live on a diet of wood is challenging, not least because wood contains so little nitrogen. So how do termites do it?

The trick lies in a cunning triple symbiosis, a team of Japanese scientists report in Friday’s issue of Science. In the termites’ gut lives an amoeba-like microbe called a protist, and inside each protist live some 10,000 members of an obscure bacterium.

The microbes in the termites’ gut are very hard to cultivate outside their termite host and so cannot be studied in the lab. . .

By comparing the DNA sequence of the bacterium’s genes with other decoded genes already in public databases, the Japanese team was able to figure out what each gene did. It could then reconstruct all the biochemical reactions of which the bacterium is capable . . .

They found that in the bacterium’s biochemical repertoire is the ability to convert nitrogen (shown as N2 , to the right of center in the figure) into ammonium and hydrogen. . .

the termite chews the wood into particles that are absorbed by the amoeba. The amoeba breaks down the cellulose of the wood and gets the nitrogen it needs from its bacteria. The net result is that the two microbes digest wood into sugars and other nutrients of use to the termite.

Again, not much new here. Bacteria that digest cellulose are as common as dirt. . . literally. Soil is heavily infested with them, and they can be found in their zillions in the gut of every ruminant. But the wood chewing bit is useful. Even goats have trouble with that. And, bacteria that fix nitrogen are common as well, though the ones we are most familiar with are symbionts of plants rather than other microbes.

It's good to know more about termites and their digestive symbionts, but the gee-whiz ignorance of this article isn't admirable.