Assistive tech for people that have trouble holding forks/spoons/etc. Made from my favorite lesser known material, polyhydroxyalkanoates, which is fully biodegradable in any biome. Anyone else making AT for people?
Wow, this stuff looks cool. “A drop of fossil energy use by 95% and greenhouse gas emission by 200% can be achieved by substituting petroleum-based polymers with PHAs.4 Therefore, PHAs have the potential to contribute to a green industrial evolution.” (source: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ra/d1ra02390j)
Oh that is very interesting! I guess the main way that they decompose is through PHA depolymerase–according to ChatGPT a lot of the species that have been tested in the decomposition of PHA are bacteria. It would be interesting to try inoculating some samples of PHA with different mushroom species as well. It would be really great if PHA could be fully-decomposed into proper food-safe compost.
Be aware that ChatGPT will simply make things up in the most convincing way if it doesn’t actually know the answer. It’s really no good as a search engine.
True, it’s always good to verify with academic articles. I’d never trust ChatGPT without also verifying with sources–if for no other reason than its training dataset was cutoff in 2021. It’s generally good to seek out research that is less than 3-5 years old when possible, due to how quickly the scientific landscape changes. According to this particular article from 2019, ChatGPT’s response was pretty accurate.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ejlt.201900101
