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The bacteria responsible for fermentation in foods like kimchi and sauerkraut could help your body excrete nanoplastics rather than absorbing them. A team of Korean researchers came to that conclusion after studying how the bacterium Leuconostoc mesenteroides interacted with plastic particles.
The microorganism in question is one of many species of lactic acid bacteria. They’re anaerobic, while many harmful bacteria require oxygen, and the acid they produce makes food a less hospitable environment for those other intruders. Since the lactic acid bacteria are comfortable marinating in their own low-pH environment, they’re also quite happy in your gut, and the feeling is mutual.
Humanity has used lactic acid fermentation as a food-preservation strategy for nearly 10,000 years. However, the notion that particulate plastic could be a threat to our health is very new. It’s interesting that this ancient solution turns out to have unexpected preventative benefits regarding this very contemporary menace.
Kimchi: Is There Anything It Can’t Do?
The study was supported in part by the World Institute of Kimchi. As someone who taught English in South Korea decades ago, it does not surprise me that Korean researchers continue to find new benefits for the national foodstuff. It is legitimately healthy (and delicious!), yet also imbued with near-magical powers in the local imagination. During my time there, I heard it credited—not always with scientific justification—with the country’s relatively low rates of everything from SARS, to AIDS, to certain cancers.
The only other country I can think of to have built its national identity around its favorite food to the same extent as Korea is Italy, yet pasta does not hold the same double status as a panacea as well as cultural icon.
The news that kimchi can now count nanoplastic absorption among the ailments it can treat will surely go over well. Yet, the finding probably applies equally to other naturally-soured foods that use Leuconostoc mesenteroides and similar bacteria, such as pickles, yogurt, tempeh, and even traditionally-prepared salami.
Sticky Bacteria Help Cleanse the Gut
The jury is still out on how harmful micro- and nanoplastics actually are, but those applying the precautionary principle find them alarming because of how difficult they are to avoid. Contemporary civilization’s tremendous reliance on plastics means our air, water, and food are absolutely littered with microscopic particles of the stuff, which can penetrate our membranes and work their way all over our bodies. Once there, they never go away.
How lactic acid bacteria help to prevent this is extremely simple. The study refers to it by the technical term of “adsorption,” but all this really means is that the plastic sticks better to the bacteria than it does to our gut. Every little bacterium gets decorated with plastic nanoconfetti and, when we eventually poop it out, the plastic goes with it.
The other known benefits of probiotics are quite complex in comparison, involving intricate ecological interactions with everything else living in your gut.
This newfound property of the lactic acid bacteria also suggests avenues for further research into nanoplastic defense. Any other larger particles that have adsorptive interactions with plastic and are easier to filter out or otherwise remove could be key to dealing with plastic pollution across a variety of contexts.
Also in Science News
Asteroid JH2 Makes a Close Approach to the Earth
Last night, a chunk of space rock that was somewhere between 16 and 35 meters in diameter whizzed by the Earth at less than 100,000 kilometers. Had it collided with us, we would have only had about a week to prepare, as JH2 was first sighted by astronomers on May 10.
The size comparisons made by other media outlets are all over the map, ranging from a blue whale to the Washington Monument, never mind the fact that there’s nearly a 100-fold mass difference between those things. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it probably weighed north of 20,000 tons, give or take, which is about a quarter or a fifth of the Washington monument in mass, though much closer to the whale in length.
More important, though, is the question of what it would have done to the Earth if it had struck us. It was similar in size to the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, which was equivalent to a half-megaton nuclear bomb, though it “detonated” high in the atmosphere and didn’t cause any outright fatalities.
That said, although unusually close, the approach wasn’t the “near miss” it’s made out to be. At 100,000 kilometers to the Earth’s 12,756 kilometer diameter, its miss was the proportional equivalent to a dart missing a dartboard by about 12 feet.
Runaway Climate Change in the Tibetan Plateau
Tibetan ice caps melting due to climate change are feeding new themokarst lakes some of which go on to become significant contributors of methane to the atmosphere. That, in turn, is a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide, which contributes to the further acceleration of rising temperatures.
The good news, say Chinese researchers, is that such lakes can also be carbon sinks, depending on their specific balance of microorganisms. They’re calling for additional research into the ecology of these newly formed bodies of water, in order to find ways to nurture the ones whose microbiome absorbs atmospheric carbon and rehabilitate or mitigate the ones that are emitting it.
AI Analysis of Magnetic Microstructures Could Benefit Electric Vehicles
Magnetic heating of metal components is a major source of energy loss in electric motors, and AI could hold the key to making efficiency improvements.
The atomic-scale behavior of metals in the presence of an oscillating magnetic field is extremely complicated, and traditional analysis requires making certain simplifying assumptions. However, a team of Japanese scientists turned AI to the problem and uncovered new, temperature-dependent properties of that behavior.
As atoms in a metal sheet flip over in response to the changing field, they take on a fractal, maze-like pattern. That pattern takes on structure at ever-finer scales as temperature increases.
At this point, the research is still in a very abstract, theoretical space. However, it could lead to advancements in materials science that would reduce magnetic heating in electric motors, among other applications across a variety of domains, such as magnetic data storage. The researchers say the same analysis techniques could equally advance fields such as crystal growth research.
