In the humus of a botanical garden, bacteria have quietly begun doing what decades of human ingenuity could not: eating plastic. Researchers at the University of Konstanz have identified an enzyme — playfully named the Pac-Man enzyme — produced by microbes colonizing the so-called plastosphere, the novel habitat humanity inadvertently created from its own waste. The discovery suggests that evolution, given enough pressure and time, may be fashioning a biological answer to one of modernity's most stubborn legacies, though whether nature can act quickly enough to outpace the accumulation remains