Flying robots equipped with bubble guns could one day help save the planet.
That is according to a study published on Wednesday in iScience by a Japanese scientist, who successfully demonstrated that soap bubbles can be used to pollinate fruit-bearing plants — seen as vital to keeping the world fed in the coming decades in the face of vanishing bee populations.
Eijiro Miyako, an associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Nomi, said that he had been working on robotic pollinators for years, but was disheartened when the drones he used smashed into flowers, destroying them.
Photo: AFP / Eijiro Miyako
“It was too sad,” Miyako said.
The whimsical idea of trying bubbles came to Miyako when he was playing with his son in a park close to their home.
The scientist was inspired when one of the bubbles harmlessly burst on his three-year-old’s face.
Miyako and coauthor Xi Yang used a microscope to confirm that soap bubbles could carry pollen.
Next, they tested five solutions available in shops, finding one called lauramidopropyl betaine — used in cosmetic products to boost foam formation — that resulted in better growth of the tube that develops from pollen grains after they are deposited on flowers.
They also added calcium to support the germination process and found the optimum pH balance.
The pair loaded their solution into a bubble gun and released pollen-bearing bubbles into a pear orchard — at a rate of about 2,000 grains per bubble — finding that 95 percent of the targeted flowers bore fruit.
“It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the ... soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination,” Miyako said.
Hand pollination is a much more labor-intensive process.
Finally, the researchers took their experiment to the skies — loading a bubble gun onto a small drone programmed to fly on a predetermined route. Since flowers were no longer in bloom, they targeted a group of fake lilies.
When flown at a height of 2m and a velocity of 2mps, the device hit the plastic plants at a 90 percent success rate.
Miyako said that he was in talks with a company for commercialization, but more work was needed to improve the robot’s precision and to potentially add autonomous flower targeting.
The study is thought to be the first exploring the properties of soap bubbles as pollen carriers and to then link the concept to autonomous drones.
The authors said that they hoped it would spark a renewed interest in artificial pollination to address “the decline in pollinator insects, the heavy labor involved in artificial pollination, and the soaring costs of pollen grains.”
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
Using virtual-reality (VR) headsets, students at a Hong Kong university travel to a pavilion above the clouds to watch an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated Albert Einstein explain game theory. The students are part of a course at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that is testing the use of “AI lecturers” as the AI revolution hits campuses around the world. The mass availability of tools such as ChatGPT has sparked optimism about new leaps in productivity and teaching, but also fears over cheating, plagiarism and the replacement of human instructors. Pan Hui (許彬), a professor of computer science who is leading