Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increased demand for single-use plastics such as face masks, gloves, and face shields. The resulting waste, some of which ends up in rivers and oceans, is intensifying pressure on an already out-of-control global plastic problem. While many researchers suspect there will be a massive influx…

Princeton researchers have invented bubble casting, a new way to make soft robots using "fancy balloons" that change shape in predictable ways when inflated with air. The new system involves injecting bubbles into a liquid polymer, letting the material solidify and inflating the resulting device to make it bend and move. The researchers used this…

A peptide sensor to detect water-soluble polymers in wastewater, a major contributor to pollution on par with microplastics, has been developed by scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology. The new technique takes advantage of the bonding that occurs between peptides and different polymers to train a machine learning algorithm that can both identify and quantify…