Folsom Prison Blues performed by Wesley, 5 years old, at the 2009 Spring Coffee Shop Jam, at The Columbia City Theater in Seattle, USA.

It’s not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last May’s Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

NOTE: there are TWO high school students who discovered plastic-consuming microorganisms. The first was Daniel Burd (last year). The second was Tseng I-Ching (last month), a high school student in Taiwan.

Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn’t considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

That was Daniel’s question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.

With 500 billion plastic bags manufactured each year and a Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that grows more expansive by the day, a low cost and nontoxic method for degrading plastic is the stuff of environmentalists’ dreams and, I would hazard a guess, a pretty good start-up company as well.

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Doctors in China are trying to treat a four-year-old boy whose heart is growing on the outside of his stomach.

Zhang Weiyuan’s heart is covered in only a layer of skin under which it can easily be seen beating, reports the Northeastern News Network.

Zhang, of Hetai village, Panjing, has been taken to Shengjing Hospital, China Medical University, where doctors are weighing up their options.

“We are not sure if we can perform surgery to put his heart back, but we’ll try our best,” said a hospital spokesman.

His parents wrap him up in clothes with extra padding to protect his heart and stop him playing with other children in case of accidents.

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This story is straight out of Taiwan, this child’s body is actually magnetic and so is his fathers. Watch as they hang silverware and an iron off of their bodies… just plain nuts! Right at the end of the video he says it all started after he was in the army. You gotta wonder what kind of experiments they were running in that country!