Plastic Eating Bacteria
Two high school senior girls in Vancouver have recently discovered a process that helps break down plastic. This process begins with solvent that dissolves the plastic, and then what is left over can be consumed by their newly developed bacteria. This bacteria was made to specifically eat phthalate, a material found in plastic that is hard to break down. Over in Japan at Kyoto University, they found a completely new bacteria species that eats plastics. There are also current studies on how meal worms can eat Styrofoam and plastic. I believe that this could be a extremely beneficial discovery to the world. Being that all the plastic ever used is still floating around somewhere on earth either in landfills or oceans, although side effects are not yet known. Learn about the bacteria here!
I think it's super fascinating that cleaner wrasse fish could possible self-aware. People typically think of fish as unintelligent creatures, but that's clearly not true for this fish. The part where the scientist injected the cleaner wrasse fish with harmless brown gel and then saw the fish attempting to scrape off the gel as if it were a parasite, once they saw themselves in the mirror, was super interesting. Humans do a similar action to this such as popping pimples, once they are aware they have one after looking in the mirror.
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