The world has a big plastic problem that it's yet to fix. We're trying to reduce our reliance on plastic, but that's seemingly impossible in modern society. The material is too important for our daily ...

Scientists have demonstrated a creative solution to plastic pollution, one of our most pressing environmental problems. Plastic was embedded with spores of plastic-eating bacteria that are activated ...

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

Solving a riddle that has confounded biologists since bacterial spores — inert, sleeping bacteria — were first described more than 150 years ago, researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered ...

A team analyzed the amino acids that affect the formation of spores in a bacterium that causes food poisoning, Clostridium perfringens, and identified serine as an amino acid that inhibits spore ...

The master chemists known as Streptomyces bacteria have turned a compound rich with the tangy odor of moist soil into a hitchhiking scam. This group of bacteria, the inspiration for streptomycin and ...

The list of winners for this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition has finally been released, and the contest’s talented photographers once again wow viewers with fantastical images of ...

Sometimes procrastination pays off. When their environment gets too stressful, many bacteria stuff some of their innards into ultratough packets called spores, which shut down and wait—potentially for ...