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Newspapers could be used to power cars, a team of molecular biologists from Tulane University in New Orleans claim.
The team from the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology has discovered a new strain of the bacteria Clostridium, which it has called TU-103 that can produce a biofuel when breaking down newspaper.
The biologists state: "TU-103 is the first bacterial strain from nature that produces 
butanol directly from cellulose" -- in the presence of oxygen. Other strains of Clostridium have been used to produce butanol before but these have had to be genetically engineered to do so. There are others that can produce butanol but not in the presence of oxygen; others that have to break down the cellulose into sugars first; and some that can break down cellulose but don't produce butanol.