🧬 Scientists turned plastic bottles into vanilla. Engineered E. coli convert PET waste into vanillin. Trash into a pantry staple. Sources: Guardian, BBC #omgfacts# #Upcycling# #Biology#

Samsung once created a bitcoin mining machine assembled from forty old Galaxy S5 smartphones. The project came from Samsung’s C-Lab in 2017 at a developer conference, and formed part of an effort to reuse old electronics. The phones ran a specially designed operating system instead of their normal Android installation. An older Galaxy tablet and an Ubuntu laptop were used in the setup. Samsung presented it as an upcycling demonstration. The reporting did not establish that it was a profitable mining operation or had discovered a Bitcoin block. The hardware was a collection of retired phones, not purpose-built mining chips.