Do you know about bioplastic? It is a kind of plastic, but it is different. Normal plastic is made from chemical materials and takes a very long time to degrade. But bioplastic is quite friendly to the environment. It is made by using bacteria to process natural sources like vegetable oil or sugar, and can break down more easily.

But there is also a problem with bioplastic, despite its advantages concerning environmental protection. The “food” that bacteria eat is also what we humans eat, meaning that bacteria are competing against humans for the same resources.

Recently, scientists have claimed that they have succeeded in finding a new way to produce bioplastic—using two kinds of bacteria and sunlight.

One kind of bacteria is called synthetic cyanobacteria, which can use sunlight to produce sugar. The other kind is Halomonas boliviensis, which lives in the salty waters of Bolivia. It eats the sugar that the first bacteria produce and then produces polymers(聚合物), which are used to create bioplastic. Interestingly, the way the bacteria store polymers is similar to the way humans store fats.

There are a couple of advantages producing bioplastic with these two bacteria, one important advantage being the speed. It is 20 times faster than the normal way we produce bioplastic. Moreover, such method can save a considerable amount of resources. Producing large amounts of bioplastic would commonly require large amounts of com and sugar to feed normal bacteria. It could mean occupation of farmland as well as food supplies. But these two special bacteria can do the same job using nothing but sunlight. The saved land can then be used to grow more food for humans. And according to the scientists, this system doesn’t need rich land or clean water at all, which is quite a bonus.

The next challenge scientists face is that they want to put their lab research into real-world practice. By doing this, bioplastic made with these two bacteria can be widely produced in the future.

Construction has started on the largest telescope array (阵列) on Earth. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will contain hundreds of radio antennae (天线) spread across two continents, is now under construction in both South Africa’s Karoo region and Western Australia’s Murchison Shire.

Together, the two sites – named SKA-Mid and SKA-Low, for the types of radio frequencies they will primarily detect – will enable high-resolution imaging of the whole sky, according to the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), the organization that oversees the telescope. The sensitivity of the telescope will allow scientists to pick up even faint signals left over from the earliest days of the universe.

“The SKA project plan has been many years in the making,” SKAO committee chair Catherine Cesarsky said in an address at the South Africa site on Dec. 5. “Today, we gather here to mark another important chapter in this 30-year journey that we’ve been on together, a journey to deliver the world’s largest scientific instrument.”

The Australia site will host 131,072 low-frequency antennae placed as far as 65 kilometers apart. Together, they’ll act as a radio telescope with a lens spanning nearly 400,000 square meters. Each antenna station is 2 ms tall and contains 256 antennae in an arrangement that looks a bit like a pine tree. By catching very-low-frequency signals from the whole sky, SKA-Low will be able to dig into some of the oldest echoes left over from the first billion years of the universe.

The site is on the land of the Native Wajarri Yamaji, who signed a land-use agreement to ensure that the telescope did not interfere with any cultural sites and that locals would receive economic and educational benefits from the site. As a part of the agreement, the Wajarri Yamaji awarded the traditional name “Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara” on the site, which means “sharing the sky and stars.”

Scientists around the world plan to use data from the telescope to study questions ranging from the fundamental nature of dark energy to the nature of mysterious fast radio bursts from distant galaxies (星系).

Animal-like robots, such as quadrupedal (四足的) robot dogs, continue to be popular. However, Italian roboticist Barbara Mazzolai argues that the robotics field has proved less keen to investigate another category of living things — plants. She owes this to a misconception that plants are capable of neither motion nor perception. “It’s not true at all,” she says.

Mazzolai and her team at the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory recently introduced “FiloBot”, a robot based on climbing plants, which is capable of growing, attaching to supports, and journeying through environments in response to external stimuli (刺激) .

To survive in forests, a climbing plant must grow out of the soil and travel along the ground searching a support to attach to. This requires a structure capable of bearing its own weight. Once a support is located, though, the plant must switch strategy-securing itself around the object and then growing towards light as quickly as possible to outcompete other plants. To choose the best growing angle, it uses information from light and gravity receptors distributed along each shoot.

FiloBot imitates these behaviours using sensors on its main shoot, which is also equipped with a spool (卷轴) of plastic and a heating element. By melting and forcing out the plastic, it can 3D-print itself. Depending on brightness and direction, it changes the heat the plastic is exposed to — lower temperatures result in a more breakable body that increases in size more rapidly, while higher temperatures make a stronger body that grow more slowly.

The researchers found that these functionalities enable FiloBot to move through complex environments flexibly, making it suitable for potential applications including environmental monitoring in hard-to-reach locations or unstable disaster sites.

FiloBot is not the only plant-like robot the team is developing. Mazzolai hopes that our robots will motivate other roboticists to take clues from plants. The plant kingdom is another world, she says, with a completely different approach to the animal one. “We can develop completely new technologies and artificial solutions, because it is so different.”