Avantium, a renewable chemical company based in the Netherlands, plans to start making plastics from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels, according to The Guardian. Plant sugars from wheat, beets and corn will be used to produce the plant plastic.

“This plastic has very attractive sustainability certificate because it uses no fossil fuels, and can be recycled— but would also break down in nature much faster than normal plastics do,” said Tom Van Aken, Avantium’s chief executive. The plant plastic would break down within a year using a composter or a few years longer under normal outdoor conditions according to trials.

Bottle manufacturer Alpla and packaging developer BillerudKorsnas are also working with Avantium on the drive to produce the world’s first 100 percent recyclable and biodegradable plant-based bottles which is known as the Paper Bottle Project, according to Green Matters.

The project is currently backed by Coca-Cola and Danone, a food and beverage company.

“It is a milestone in the development of high-value applications such as specialty bottles,” said Avantium marketing director Marcel Lubben.

Despite the coronavirus lockdowns, the project is still on track. More partnerships with food and drink companies will be revealed later as businesses continue to seek environmentally friendly alternatives to ensure the future of their bottled products.

Plant plastic may appear in supermarkets by 2023. The project will produce 5,000 tons of plastic every year and increase its production as the demand for renewable plastic rises.

In a robotics lab on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, New York, three small robots have a problem to solve.

They are told that two of them have been given a “dumbing pill” that stops them talking. In reality the push of a button has silenced them, but none of them knows which one is still able to speak. That’s what they have to work out.

Unable to solve the problem, the robots all attempt to say “I don't know”. But only one of them makes any noise. Hearing its own robotic voice, it understands that it cannot have been silenced. “Sorry, I know now! I was able to prove that I was not given a dumbing pill,” it says. It then writes a formal mathematical proof and saves it to its memory to prove it has understood.

This is the first time a robot has passed a classic test called the wise-man puzzle. It sounds like a simple test and it is, only skirting the foothills of consciousness, But showing that robots can work out the logical puzzles requiring an element of self-awareness is an important step towards building machines that understand their place in the world.

Selmer Bringsjord of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, who ran the test, says that by passing many tests of this kind --- however narrow --- robots will build up a repertoire (计算机指令表) of abilities that start to become useful. Instead of thinking over whether machines can ever be conscious like humans, he aims to demonstrate specific, limited examples of consciousness.

“They try to find some interesting philosophical problem, and then engineer a robot that can solve that problem,” says John Sullins, a philosopher of technology at Sonoma State University. “They're barking up the right tree.”

The robots must be able tolsten to and understand the question “which pill did you receive?”, as asked by a human. They must then hear their own voice saying “I don't know” and understand that it was they that said it, connecting that with the idea that they did not receive a silencing pill.

Bringsjord's robots may appear conscious in this specific case, assessing their own state and coming to a conclusion. But the broader, deeper intelligence that humans have is completely missing. The robots can pass the wise-man test but wouldn't have a hope of recognizing their own feet. Bringsjord says one reason robots can't have broader consciousness is that they just can't deal with enough data. Even though cameras can capture more data about a scene than the human eye, robots are at a loss as to how to put all that information together to build a whole picture of the world.

Did you know roughly one third of food for human consumption goes to waste? Most of it is fresh fruits and vegetables that go bad. The produce dries out or goes bad, which has led scientists to develop ways of coating or sealing the food to keep it fresher for longer. Now research at Rice University reveals there might be a better way.

Scientists discovered that dipping produce like strawberries and bananas into an egg-based was his remarkably good for preserving it. The coating is extremely thick, and made from a mixture of powdered egg whites and yolks(70%), and some wood-sourced cellulose(纤维素) to act as a barrier preventing water loss.

What the scientists found was that the egg-based wash made a significant difference in helping produce stay fresh over a two-week observation period. The appearance of the coated fruits and vegetables didn’t change much, while the uncoated produce ripened and even rotted within the same timeframe. The egg-based coating, as it turned out, reduced each fruit’s chance to get exposed to oxygen.

The non-poisonous coating was found to be flexible and tests showed that it was just as tough as other products， including synthetic films(合成膜), used in produce packaging. For anyone with an egg allergy, the coating can be removed by thorough washing in water and is tasteless.

The scientists hope this could be a breakthrough in the fight against food waste. “Reducing food shortages in ways that are not related to genetic modification, uneatable coatings or chemical additives is important for better sustainable living,” said materials scientist and study author Pulickel Ajayan.

What’s great about this discovery is that it fights food waste in more than one way: even the coating was made from eggs that would otherwise have been thrown away because they weren’t fit for consumption. The researchers said roughly 200 million of US produced eggs go to waste annually. So if this were scaled up, it could be a win-win situation all around.