Black soldier flies are neither disease vectors nor pests, and they're proving increasingly useful to humans in processing waste. For many years, it's been known that their larvae have a huge appetite for organic waste like household food scraps, and a tendency to poop out highly nutritious fertilizer ?" and once they reach a certain size, they can be scooped up, washed, dried out and ground up into a fine powder that can be mixed in with animal feed as a source of protein and fat. It's a bit of a grim life, but then this organic waste would normally be eaten by microbes in a landfill somewhere, which would decompose it into methane, a massively more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Now, synthetic biology specialists at Macquarie University propose that with a little genetic engineering, black soldier flies could be used as sustainable biomanufacturing plants, expanding their diet to include lower-grade "municipal biosolids" from sewage treatment plants and sla