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| Plastic Pollution (Photo by Muntaka Chasant) |
Humans pride themselves upon being adaptable, but bacteria seem even more so.
While people are burying themselves with plastic, bacteria are literally having a feast. One such microbe was chomping down on sandwich bags at a Japanese dump back in 2016. Upon discovering this, scientists had an aha moment. They thought to themselves, “If Nature could make this happen, why can’t we make it happen even faster?”
So get to work they did. They whipped those little critters into shape by engineering “super-enzymes” into their tiny physiques. Sure enough, their chomping increased “six times faster.” Sounds great, but why stop there? How about 60 times? 600… You get the idea.
Faster is not always better, but in this case it might be. Plastic has been leading the race to the bottom for far too long.
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Copyright September 30, 2020 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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