News Life

Here’s how long it would take 100 worms to eat the plastic in one face mask

An experiment reveals that such bio-solutions to our plastics problem will likely fall short

meal worms on a flat surface

Even a natural genius at plastic recycling like the yellow mealworm turns out to be ridiculously inadequate at coping with the amount of microplastics humans create.

Fernando Trabanco Fotografía/Getty Images

By Susan Milius

Insects rank high among humankind’s go-to creatures for strangeness: Think movie monster inspirations or extreme biophysics (SN: 11/7/22).

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