{"id":271234,"date":"2021-06-10T18:35:50","date_gmt":"2021-06-10T15:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/yo-plastic-soup-these-tiny-swimming-bots-are-coming-to-destroy-you\/"},"modified":"2021-06-10T18:35:50","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T15:35:50","slug":"yo-plastic-soup-these-tiny-swimming-bots-are-coming-to-destroy-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/yo-plastic-soup-these-tiny-swimming-bots-are-coming-to-destroy-you\/","title":{"rendered":"#Yo, plastic soup! These tiny swimming bots are coming to destroy you"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Yo, plastic soup! These tiny swimming bots are coming to destroy you<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

Microplastics are everywhere, from the Mediterranean seafloor<\/a>\u00a0to Mount Everest<\/a>, and the tiny fragments of litter can take hundreds of years to degrade. They can also absorb heavy metals and pollutants that could harm humans or animals that inadvertently consume them.<\/p>\n

At less than 5mm in length, the polymers are hard to remove manually. But there may be\u00a0a more efficient method of eliminating the plastic scourge: attacking them with\u00a0bacteria-sized robots.<\/p>\n

Scientists at the\u00a0University of Chemistry and Technology<\/a> in Prague recently developed self-propelled microrobots that can swim onto microplastics and break them down.<\/p>\n

The tiny bots \u2014 about the size of a red blood cell \u2014 use solar power to move through water and dismantle microplastics that they find.<\/p>\n

[Read:\u00a0Why entrepreneurship in emerging markets matters]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In a proof-of-concept study<\/a>, the microbots successfully swam down a maze of channels to efficiently degrade a range of synthetic microplastics:<\/p>\n

Overall, this proof-of-concept study using microrobots with hybrid wireless powers has shown for the first time the possibility of efficient degradation of ultrasmall plastic particles in confined complex spaces, which can impact research on microplastic treatments, with the final goal of diminishing microplastics as an emergent threat for humans and marine ecosystems.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Credit: Adapted from ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces<\/a><\/figcaption>
<\/a>The microrobots (dark blue dots) use visible light to break down microplastic\u00a0into smaller molecules.<\/figcaption>