Swarms of Tiny Robots Remove Microplastics From Soil and Water (phys.org) 41
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots.
Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. "In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them," the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples.
They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.
Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. "In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them," the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples.
They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.
In a related news... (Score:3)
...swarms of robots remove pieces of tiny robots that collided each other, and microplastics.
Re:In related news... (Score:3)
Ingested? (Score:2)
So what do these things do if ingested by animals, like humans?
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Make you invincible to micro-plastics. Meet Nano-Man, able to swallow an entire McDonald's Big Mac and NOT die.
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Exactly. What percentage of the robots did they recover? What happens to the ones left behind? Are they extracting anything else from the soil?
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They cause Koro. [wikipedia.org] A truly deadly disease if you can convince large parts of the population that some sort of witchcraft is the cause and they attack and kill the accused group.
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Difficult to tell given we can't find a person without detectable levels.
Removing it will never be (Score:2)
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The problem of microplastics already exists around the world, including in the snow on Antarctica and mother's milk.
When this would lead to an affordable way to catch and remove the existing microplastics this would be great news.
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It's also robotwashing. These fundamentally aren't robots, both because they're remotely motivated and because they make no decisions on their own.
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Re: Removing it will never be (Score:3)
It doesn't take an engineer to figure out it's bullshit which isn't necessary to drum up interest on a site for nerds
Re:Removing it will never be (Score:4, Interesting)
I work at a robotics company. While I personally have no robotics background, I've had several conversations with a wide variety of "robot people" about the specific question "what is a robot?" It turns out it's not a simple question where everyone agrees on the answer.
But in all those conversations, with all those people (who make robots for a living) ... no one has ever proposed "must make decisions on their own" as a prerequisite for being a robot.
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That's what it meant ever since RUR. I'll grant that PR people keep spinning different meanings for it though.
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But in all those conversations, with all those people (who make robots for a living) ... no one has ever proposed "must make decisions on their own" as a prerequisite for being a robot.
Maybe you should talk to some people who other people agree know things [robotsguide.com] instead of the people you work with who don't care enough to know the meanings of words. You'll see making decisions and various proxies for it throughout that article.
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What's wrong with the original definition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The term robot came from the Czech language in 1923. The word was coined by Czech author Karel Capek, first used in his play R.U.R. (translated as Rossum's Universal Robots). The term comes from the Czech word robotník ('forced worker'), from robota 'forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,' from robotiti 'to work, drudge', from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota () 'servitude,' from rabu 'slave'. From Old Slavic *orbu-, from PIE *orbh- 'pass from one status to another'.
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If I read that summary correctly, this will only ever be usable to clean small amounts of stuff in a closed container. It's not going to work for, say, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
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Recycling is effective when done right. While we do need to stop putting more microplastics into the environment, being able to remove them will be very useful because there are already vast quantities there. The key will be doing it cheaply.
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A Clockwork Origin (Score:2)
I remember that episode of Futurama. It didn't end great for the humans.
What else are the pulling in from the environment (Score:2)
I guess, as with everything, the devil is in the details.
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Though other than being alarmed, if plastics are as bad as the for us as we imagine wouldn't more people be suffering from the contamination?
What makes you think they aren't? Maybe our cancer rates would be a lot lower still than they are now without the microplastics? Or maybe plastic is turning the frogs gay, who knows? ;)
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It is also true that overall life expectancies are at an all time high overall. That all by itself could also account for higher cancer rates. As people age they are less likely to avoid illness, cancers, and other diseases. But your hypothesis does seem like a reasonable one.
To be clear I am not saying I want our world covered in micro plastics. I don't want it in my food or water. It just doesn't s
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The problem is we don't have a control group of people who don't ingest microplastics but are otherwise the same as those who do. We can of-course compare the health of people from more and less contaminated areas, but those more and less contaminated areas will likely also differ in other ways, both known and unknown, that may have more significant effects than the microplastics.
Not robots? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have a machine that moves balls around according to some scheme, the machine itself might be a robot, but the balls that it moves are not robots. The "robots" in this article are not capable of independent motion, they are moved by an external magnetic field, and their only interaction with their environment is through passive chemical reactions. They are particles. They are as much robots as iron filings are, IMHO. The "robot" / "microrobot" term seems like just clickbait.
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I looked it up briefly, and it seems their use case does conform to definitions of "microbot" and "microrobot" as used elsewhere.
A robot is a machine which does stuff and makes some decisions on its own. The motes being moved around externally are fundamentally not robots, and anyone claiming otherwise is polluting language with bullshit for their own ends.
Definitely Interesting (Score:2)
How much power is needed to drive them? They remove a high percentage of the target material, does this scale and how much none target material comes along with the target material?
What happens when fish eat these robots? (Score:2)
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ALL WILL BE CLEANSED.
Tiny Wall-Es? (Score:2)
nft
my number 3 robot task (Score:2)
take out the trash
Most important is it's robots (Score:2)
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From a brief examination with Google AI Overview, apparently these are not robots at all but in nanotech/materials science such powder used like swimmers are called microrobots. There is a big problem though that to make the MXene (porous high surface area sheet-like particles) magnetic you coat it with something like Nickel, which can leach toxic ions. So if you don't pick up all the bot particles you might add another poison.. That said I'm definitely all for research into microplastic removal though most