Bacterial ice-nucleating proteins have been commercialized since the 1980s
Dacia Leone · How Supercool Earth's microbes could ease the water crisis · May 20, 2026 · at 11:45
Supercool Earth CEO Dacia Leone explains the scientific history of ice-nucleating proteins used in commercial snowmaking.
0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“They, there are bacterial versions of these proteins that are used in a product called Stomax, and those have been very well studied since the eighties.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dacia Leone
Supercool Earth extracts more water from clouds than silver iodide
“And what we bring, as opposed to silver iodide, is that we can target more clouds and essentially bring, get more rain than silver iodide can currently today. So we can target more geographies, more warmer clouds, more seasonalities, and then at that same temp…”
Supercool Earth induces precipitation within 30 minutes of delivery
“It's an in and out technology that we're developing where we have the effect, we induce precipitation within zero to 30 minutes of delivery, and then that precipitation goes away.”
Multiple VC-backed startups are scaling geoengineering technologies
“There is a lot, there are many up-and-coming companies within the startup space that are VC-backed, that are exploring these technologies and wanting to bring them to scale.”
Biology cannot solve everything and chemistry often wins
“As much as I love biology, we can't deploy it for every single solution. Chemistry wins a lot.”
Silver iodide does not degrade and harms humans, microbes, and fish
“Whereas silver iodide is a metal, and it does not degrade in the environment. So it, ah, it sticks around, and it's bad for humans, for microbes, and for fish. And it's not something that will go away once you release it down into the environment.”