New research from chemical engineers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology may result in us adding another tool to our decarbonization arsenal: a microscopic bacterium named Cupriavidus necator that can turn CO2 gas into a biodegradable plastic.

Their work, published on March 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that with the right setup and ingredients, C. necator can continuously produce a bioplastic from CO2 in the air. If the method is able to be scaled up, such a system could be a two-in-one solution, converting excess CO2 into a biodegradable plastic that obviates the need for energy-inefficiant plastic production.

Do you think it's a feasible way to help save the planet?

It’s easy to take delight in the schadenfreude of one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world taking L after L—especially when they’re attempting to create something that seems like a ludicrous pipe dream at best and an absolute waste of time, money, and resources at worst.

However, the truth is the metaverse is inevitable. Not only that but, in many ways, it’s already here—and has been here for decades.

Even Neal Stephenson, who first coined the term metaverse in his 1992 book Snow Crash to describe a fictional virtual reality world, has alluded to this. In a tweet from June, he said that when he first came up with the term, he didn’t conceive of the fact that a metaverse might not be through VR—but then came along a video game called Doom.

Stephenson touched on a key component of any successful metaverse that many folks within the web3 (a term used to describe the next evolution of the world wide web) and metaverse space tend to miss: video games—or even just gaming in general.

“It’s not so much that the metaverse is the future of games. The future of the metaverse is games,” Jon Radoff, the writer of the Building the Metaverse blog and founder of metaverse consulting firm Beamable, told The Daily Beast. “Games are going to be what the metaverse is all about.”

What do you think is the future of the metaverse? Will Mark Zuckerberg's vision become reality?

More and more scientists think it’s time to think through the political implications of first contact.

“In the event of contact, things will likely move very quickly, and we may not have the time to carefully vet our reasoning,” said Chelsea Haramia, a philosopher at Spring Hill College in Alabama.

When Kenneth Wisian and John Traphagan, respectively geophysicist and religious-studies experts at the University of Texas, studied the issue back in 2020, they came away more than a little worried.

Their main concern was that whichever country first makes contact with intelligent aliens—by way of a probe or radio broadcast or some other means—might suddenly become the most powerful country ever. Even if it wasn’t very powerful before first contact.

Knowledge of alien technology, “if wielded solely by one nation here on Earth, might enable it to dominate the world,” Wisian and Traphagan wrote in their peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Space Policy.

“Controlling communication with an [extraterrestrial intelligence] could be the biggest ‘prize’ ever in international competition.”

It was an alarming assertion. But not every scientist agreed with it. A team led by Jason Wright, a Penn State astronomer, rebutted Wisian and Taphagan in a different study. Their main point is that the most likely method of contacting aliens is also the easiest and cheapest: radio.

Almost any country with satellite T.V. could use the same basic tech to listen to, and talk back to, aliens. “There are an enormous number of radio dishes designed to communicate with Earth satellites that could easily be repurposed for such an effort,” wrote Wright and his coauthors.

So which group of scientists do you think is right? How will humans respond?