Wax moth larvae eats plastic

Quote:

The larvae of wax moths are sold as delicious snacks for chub, carp and catfish, but in the wild the worms live on beeswax, making them the scourge of beekeepers across Europe. Tiny plastic pellets found on 73% of UK beaches Read more But in a chance discovery, a scientist and amateur beekeeper has found that waxworms have a taste for more than wax. When Federica Bertocchini removed an infestation from one of her hives and put them in a plastic bag, the worms simply ate their way out. .... The breakout led Bertocchini, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, and scientists at Cambridge University, to investigate the feeding habits of the centimetre-long Galleria mellonella grubs. In lab tests, they discovered that 100 worms can devour 92 milligrams of polyethylene in as little as 12 hours. With such a voracious appetite for plastic, the worms could be put to good use, the scientists reasoned. Each year, the average person uses more than 200 plastic bags which can take between 100 and 400 years to degrade in landfill sites. The grubs appear to breakdown polyethylene with the same enzymes they use for eating beeswax. To confirm that the worms were not simply chewing the plastic into smaller pieces, the scientists mashed some of them up and smeared the grub paste on plastic bags. Again, according to the study in Current Biology, holes appeared.

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That definitely sounds interesting.

BTW, why can't we use some of those supercomputers and do it like this:
Feed it with the basics (particle physics, how atoms are formed, how molecules are formed, enzymes etc.) and then ask what stuff is needed to breakdown polyethylene.

I mean this more like a general question about how to figuring out what stuff is needed to do X.

All the basics are known, there are no hidden particles anymore with regards to our everyday-life.

I know that question might be silly, but I really do not know why powerfull computers can't figure out something like this? What are the obstacles? Are there are too much possibilities/lack of computing power or are there still barriers in terms of understanding how stuff works when it comes to more than a few atoms?

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2peybse