Austrian designer Sonja Baumel has a proposal that is interesting and appalling at the same time. The designer is at work on a project called “(In)visible Membranes: Life on the Human Body and Its Design Applications.” As the name of the project suggests, the Life on the Human Body is a reference to the invisible skin bacteria on our skins, and the Design Applications are fabrics made from these bacteria.
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Scientists around the globe are striving to find ways to survive on different planets — Mars being the priority. And we all know the amount of success they have had. Finally a breakthrough in this research could be the discovery of a bug found 2 miles deep in a Greenland ice sheet.

The H. Glaciei bacteria  belongs to the rare ‘ultramicro’ family which have the capability of surviving under extreme conditions. This particular bacteria was sleeping for a period of 120,000 years and was brought back to life by warming the ice samples that contained them.

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image by WYGD

Daniel Burd is an 11th grader from Canada, that wants to turn his school science project into a dream come true. The guy is certain that if a plastic bag takes 1,000 years to decompose it’s because of the microorganisms behind it, and Burd thinks he has a method that will cause them to decompose in just three months.

The young scientist searched for those “guilty” of decomposing plastic bags and found two strains of bacteria that work together; the primary bacteria is Sphingomonas while the other one is Pseudomonas. Creating an industrial solution for plastic bags that would only last for three month is extremely simple. “All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags,” Burd said.

Though it doesn’t solve the pollution in the Pacific, this guy’s idea is a simple enough that it might just work well enough to change the world (at least a bit). He deserves congratulations and some money to continue his research and make it a real solution, instead of a project.

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Source: The Record