Is microwave cooking nuking all the nutrients? Micorwaves have been a kitchen staple since the late 1960s, but are they safe for our food? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Originally used for radar and other technologies, the power of microwaves was first harnessed specifically for heating food in 1947 . By the late 1960s, commercial microwave ovens were small and inexpensive enough to become fixtures of the modern kitchen.

Viral Video: It has been a long time since we started availing the services of robots, the electronic humans, perhaps the first ever non-official definition of the wonder machine. Now, robotics is very much in vogue and has mass use across industries. One of the key reasons to deploy these programmable machines is their high efficiency and the ability to work for longer hours than humans without getting tired. However, a video has surfaced showing a robot placing plastic containers on a conveyor belt. The video is in a time-lapse, suggesting that the robot has been on the job for hours and the last few frames show the real-time where the machine picks up a container and as soon as it lifts it, it collapses.

A plastic-degrading enzyme enhanced by amino acid changes designed by a machine-learning algorithm can depolymerise polyethylene terephthalate (PET) at least twice as fast and at lower temperatures than the next best engineered enzyme. Six years ago scientists sifting through debris of a plastic bottle recycling plant discovered a bacterium that can degrade PET. The organism has two enzymes that hydrolyse the polymer first into mono-(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate and then into ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid to use as an energy source. One enzyme in particular, PETase, has become the target of protein engineering efforts to make it stable at higher temperatures and boost its catalytic activity. A team around Hal Alper from the University of Texas at Austin in the US has created a PETase that can degrade 51 different PET products, including whole plastic containers and bottles.