[SJackson]

Outdoors/Rural/wildlife/hunting/hiking/backpacking/National Parks/animals list please FR mail me to be on or off . And ping me is you see articles of interest.

[piasa]

So, they want to replace microplastics with a larger chunk of plastic that looks like a dirty fish that will probably lure even larger fish to swallow it.

[alexander_busek]

The robo-fish is just 13mm long, and thanks to a light laser system in its tail, swims and flaps around at almost 30mm a second, similar to the speed at which plankton drift around in moving water.

Why the heck does it have to swim around, in order to collect micro-particles? It's the sea! Just build some giant floating installation of this material and let the micro-particles come to it!

13-mm-long robo-fish, similar to plankton? Yeah, I bet the baleen whales will find them most tasty!

Regards,

[Bob434]

We need robowhales or packs of robosharks to devour the floating plastic heaps on the oceans.

[piasa]

Wouldn’t all those tiny laser light systems built into the tails of these things have tiny batteries that will pollute worse than microplastics?

[piasa]

“It is of great significance to develop a robot to accurately collect and sample detrimental microplastic pollutants from the aquatic environment,” said Yuyan Wang, a researcher at the Polymer Research Institute of Sichuan University and one of the lead authors on the study. Her team’s novel invention is described in a research paper in the journal Nano Letters. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of such soft robots.”

I think the used condoms floating off the coast of Southern California function the same way.

[glorgau]

The Chinese will SELL the robots to western countries and continue dumping plastics into the oceans so as not to kill their market.

[teeman8r]

circa 2323... a giant plastic fish is a danger to shipping lanes as the tiny fish grows into a behemoth, 10 times larger than a blue whale.

[webheart]

Bullshit. They won’t make enough of them to make a difference and the things won’t fix themselves.

[T. Rustin Noone]

I’ve got a better idea.

Since the plastics, micro or otherwise, seem to float near the surface, we need to invent an ocean-going ROOMBA, programmed to sweep its area of the ocean of contaminants and then take the contents to a collection point when full. Rinse. Repeat.