Good news on plastic recycling, gene editing, faster internet

I’ll leave the free section of this Fix the News to you; among the items requiring a subscription:

— “One of the biggest hurdles in plastic recycling has always been the necessity of meticulously sorting plastic waste by type,” says Tobin Marks of Northwestern University, senior author of a new study. “Our new catalyst could bypass this costly and labor-intensive step for common polyolefin plastics [used in plastic bottles, food packaging, grocery bags], making recycling more efficient, practical and economically viable than current strategies,” he tells Phys.org.

— Other Northwestern scientists have developed a new nanostructure that supercharges the ability of the CRISPR gene-editing technology to safely and efficiently enter cells, potentially unlocking its full power to treat genetic diseases, says Science Daily. 

By wrapping CRISPR’s tools in spherical DNA-coated nanoparticles, the researchers have tripled the gene-editing success rate, improved precision, and dramatically reduced toxicity compared to current methods, Science Daily says.

— New hollow-core fiber optics that look like long glass straws could enable a faster internet. The new design, from the University of Southampton, guides light through air, reducing signal loss and latency and letting signals travel up to 45 percent faster than they do through solid fiberglass. If the new “glass straws” prove to be durable and easy to install, they could cut down on the amount of energy it takes to run the internet by carrying more data over longer distances with lower costs, says Fix the News, citing the journal Nature.