For as long as modern industry has packaged, assembled, and bonded the objects of daily life, petroleum has been the silent ingredient holding it all together — including the adhesives meant to disappear. Researchers at KAIST in South Korea have now reprogrammed a common bacterium to produce biodegradable hot-melt adhesives from glucose, matching or surpassing the performance of petroleum-based standards while allowing the finished product to genuinely return to nature. The work, led by Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee and published in Nature Communications, suggests that the boundary betw