Plastic-Eating Worms Could Inspire Waste-Degrading Tools

Humans produce more than 300 million metric tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills, and up to 12 million metric tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no sustainable way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.

Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the larvae of the greater wax moth can efficiently degrade polyethylene, which accounts for 40 percent of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and degraded about 92 milligrams, or roughly 3 percent, of it. To confirm that the larvae’s chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers ground some grubs into a paste and applied it to plastic films. Fourteen hours later the films had lost 13 percent of their mass—presumably broken down by enzymes from the worms’ stomachs.

When inspecting the degraded plastic films, the team also found traces of ethylene glycol, a product of polyethylene breakdown, signaling true biodegradation. Their findings were published earlier this year in Current Biology.

Study co-author Federica Bertocchini, a biologist at Spain’s Institute of Biomedicine & Biotechnology of Cantabria, says the larvae’s ability to break down their dietary staple—beeswax—also allows them to degrade plastic. “Wax is a complex mixture of molecules, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well,” she explains. “The wax worm evolved a mechanism to break this bond.”   

Jennifer DeBruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that an organism evolved the capacity to degrade polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of biodegradation in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to pinpoint the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes? Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team’s findings might one day help harness the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills, as well as those scattered throughout the ocean. But she envisions using the chemical in some kind of industrial process—not simply “millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic.”

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China is building the world’s fastest amphibious fighting vehicle

China’s ZTD-05 amphibious tank, armed with a 105mm cannon that fires both high velocity shells and guided missiles, is the world’s fastest amphibious vehicle, speeding through the water at over 20 knots. In the future, it could be accompanied by amphibious wheeled AFVs, which can keep up with it in the water and speed ahead of it on land for recon duty.

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NASA selects new class of astronauts for future exploration

The next astronaut to break Peggy Whitson’s spacewalk record could be in the group NASA just announced. The 22nd class of spacewalkers consists of 12 individuals hailing from all over the US. They include nuclear, mechanical and aerospace engineers, antarctic-exploring biologists, test pilots, Navy SEAL medics, Army and Marine helicopter pilots, NASA JPL scientists and SpaceX employees.

The potential astronauts were chosen from 18,300 applications — twice as many as the previous record — whose only requirements were a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field, three or more years in a related field (or a thousand hours of flight time in a jet aircraft) and the ability to pass NASA’s physical. The candidates will spend two years training, simulating spacewalks in deep pools, learning to fly NASA test craft and taking a host of scientific and expeditionary courses before they will be considered for official missions. These may include trips to the ISS, the moon or to other planets in an Orion capsule atop NASA’s Space Launch System — all wearing the next generation of space suits and protective gear.

As NASA’s FAQ notes, this will be the 22nd class of astronauts since the first batch was recruited in 1959 for the Mercury project that put the first American and second human, Alan Shepard, into space. Other milestone classes include the eighth in 1978 that included the first female, African American and Asian American astronauts, and the 21st class in 2013, which was the first to achieve a 50/50 gender ratio. Future groups might get a headstart if more programs like Lockheed Martin’s Generation Beyond start preparing tomorrow’s astronauts in middle school.

Source: NASA

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Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of…

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