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Scientists have discovered a worm that eats plastic bags and leave behind antifreeze

Polyethylene: not your average meal

The wax worm, a caterpillar typically used for fishing bait and known for damaging beehives by eating their wax comb, has now been observed munching on a different material: plastic bags.

Scientist Federica Bertocchini of the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria in Spain first noticed the wax worms’ plastic-eating skills when she was cleaning up a wax worm infestation in one of the beehives she keeps at home. She put the worms in a plastic bag, tied it closed, and put the bag in a room of her house while she finished cleaning the hive. When she returned to the room, “they were everywhere,” Bertocchini said in a statement. They’d escaped by chewing their way out of the bag, and fast.

“This project began there and then,” she said. In a paper published in Current Biology on Monday (April 24), Bertocchini and her colleagues described 100 wax worms chewing through a polyethylene shopping bag—the kind that people discard at a rate of 1 trillion per year globally—in around 40 minutes. After 12 hours, the bag was significantly shredded.

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5 things you didn’t know about...aluminium

Credit: beejung / Shutterstock

1. Despite being the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, aluminium is a young metal, discovered less than 200 years ago. It is now the second most used metal in the world, after iron.

2. Aluminium was named after alum, derived from the latin Alumenen, meaning ‘a bitter salt’, by Sir Humphry Davy. In 1808, Davy suggested Aluminium could be produced by electrolytic reduction from alumina (aluminium oxide), but did not manage to prove the theory in practice.

3. The first person to produce small amount of aluminium was Danish chemist Hans Christian Oersted, on 8 April 1825. However, this may not have been pure aluminium, but an alloy with the elements used in the experiments in the process of isolating the aluminium.

4. The first aluminium products are considered to be medals made during Napoléon III’s reign. Friedrich Woehler, a German chemist who improved Oersted’s isolation process, designed a rattle for Crown Prince Louis Napoléon made of aluminium and gold.

5. Aluminium is 100% recyclable. It is estimated that 75% of all aluminium ever produced, about 750 million tonnes, is still in use, and could all be recycled into new products.

Find out more about this on page 62 of the upcoming March issue of Materials World.  

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