Mother Nature is perhaps the most reliable muse, inspiring the likes of artists, scientists, and engineers with tried-and-true evolutionary designs. But many of nature’s most sophisticated structures have only recently been unlocked, enabling researchers to mimic things like a gecko’s grip and the ability of an octopus to camouflage itself.
To tackle some of today’s most pressing man-made natural disasters, a team of researchers from the University of Southern California have turned to the leaves of a floating fern called Salvinia molesta, which have strange eggbeater-shaped protrusions. The unusual shape contained within these leaves makes them “super-hydrophobic,” meaning they repel water. The aim is to make man-made materials that are inspired by these leaves that can separate oil from water, hopefully resulting in more efficient oil spill cleanups.
“In our work, super-hydrophobic, micro-scale artificial hairs with eggbeater heads inspired by the Salvinia molesta leaf were fabricated by a new three-dimensional printing process,” Yong Chen, a USC engineer who led the research, told Digital Trends. “We are the first to build this eggbeater structure, at the same size as in nature, by using 3D-printing technology.”
It isn’t easy to re-create the complex structures found in nature. To do so, Chen and his team used an advanced technique called immersed surface accumulation 3D printing to develop the array of microstructures that have both super-hydrophobic and oil-absorbing properties. Together, these forces offer an efficient way to separate oil from water, and potentially clean up vast areas on contaminated ocean.
“Eventually, the technology can be applied to manufacture materials in large scale and accommodate massive oil spills in the ocean,” Chen said. “The ‘Salvinia effect’ also has the potential for liquid-handling technology that executes micro-droplet manipulation, a breakthrough where the adhesion of liquid to a robotic arm can be tuned accordingly and result in the efficient transfer for tiny amounts of liquid and 3D cell culture.”
So far, the researchers have developed a small prototype demonstrating the eggbeater structures. Moving forward, they plan to increase the size of their structure to treat larger areas, such as oceans impacted by oil spills.
A paper detailing the prototype structure was recently published in the journal Advanced Materials.
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.