Credit: Zak Noyle/A Frame

We posted this genuinely dark and unfortunately not remotely photoshopped shot from Zak Noyle this summer. It was taken in Indonesia and shows the extent to which rubbish is taking over the ocean. How did it make you feel when you saw it? It made me feel sick but also pretty damn powerless in the scheme of things. As in why does it matter if I avoid water bottles and recycle as much as I can when the trash from some countries is just being dumped or washed into the sea.

And there’s also the stuff you can’t see, like the tiny granules of plastic that never decompose instead just getting passed from one species to another. Buuut then our German editor Anna sent me a link to this spirit-lifting

It sounds too good to be true. Science saving us humans from our muck ups and Boyen is keen to admit it’s very early days in his research and he’s still undertaking feasability studies but he has a cool TED talk on his site and we’re all wishing him all the success in the world!