Smiles Behind Worn Down Masks

As the year comes to an end, I feel like most people will look back with a sense of disgust and hatred that came to be 2020. This was the year of the great Covid-19 which has single handedly brought the entire world into a massive standstill. People have been isolated in their homes, and while this year has brought with it innumerable struggles, it is vital to find light and positives in this otherwise abyss of despair. While the world fights to recover, let us aid in this collective effort with a mind full of motivation and potential, let us all try to smile behind our worn down masks.

Taking a step back, in 2007 the company that came to be known as Licella was founded. From Licella was the invention of the Cat-HTR. Now, I can imagine there are a few questions to come from this, what does Cat-HTR mean and why am I talking about something that happened 13 years ago? To put it shortly, Cat-HTR stands for, Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor, and it has the potential to revolutionize the fuel industry. As the official website states, “Our Cat-HTR^TM chemical recycling technology creates recycled oil from waste plastic in just 20 minutes” and if that feels too great to be true, Biofuelsdigest released an article this year, discussing how this technology can extract 85% of usable oil from plastic with 45% less CO² emissions than the more commercially accepted option of incineration. What brings 2020 into the picture is that January of this year Licella and BioLogiQ have both agreed to work together to commercialize the Cat-HTR and make it available to the greater globe. The potential of this is immense, not only could this result in a global decrease of plastic waste, but it would also contribute to lowering the plastic levels in our oceans, saving sea life.

Continuing on the topic of Eco solutions, ecoLogicStudio who has worked on Algae based air purification systems since 2018, came out with a project titled, “BioBombola” during the heat of the pandemic. Like previous products under the overall, Photo.Synth.Etica program, the BioBombola is an algae central way of converting surrounding CO² into O². What makes BioBombola unique though, is that it is set up to be able to be maintained and cared for in the comfort of one’s abode, allowing for anyone to easily foster and produce clean O². Just like Cat-HTR the plan is to be able to make this commercialized, with the target audience being the polluted major Urban cities. I find this beyond incredible, to be able to have an algae farm in your own house that is producing O², large scale applications I could only imagine would be mind boggling. So, if you can say anything good about 2020, it would for sure be that we are in the pioneering stages of a new age of Eco health and improvement.

As a finishing touch of this article I want to spend a brief amount of time discussing a revolutionary combination of life and technology. Imagine a robot that is not only small enough to deliver medicine into the bloodstream, but can also repair itself upon taking damage and doesn’t use a single bit of metal or non biodegradable material. And no, it isn’t witchcraft or magic, it is called Xenobots, and now this is something that I am truly nerding over. Essentially, Xenobots are cells taken from frog embryos, that are programmed to do certain tasks or actions by rearranging the biological makeup of them. They act as robots in the sense that they can be manipulated and programmed to function in an assigned way, but as they are completely made of natural cells, it results in this fascinating entity of exploration. At the moment, they can’t do much than spin in circles, but as the first successful Xenobot was created this year, the possibilities are near endless. Beyond this, the research team has already noticed that they act even stranger in groups, using each other to move and function as if they communicate with each other. If you want to study more about this, like all other topics discussed, my sources used are in the footnotes.

I hope if anything, this article has sparked a sense of curiosity in you, maybe you learned something you didn’t know before, or maybe this has helped you feel a bit more excited about the endeavours to come. I must say, beyond everything, looking into the topics that I used for this article has made me realize just how changing our world is, we are too late to explore the continents, too early to explore the stars, but right where we need to be to marvel at the wonders and beauty that is our Earth. It is overwhelming in a way, just as we thought everything was figured out, and that we were living in the worst time in our life, a light appeared at the end of the tunnel that said, “Keep going, you aren’t even half way there, and there is so much more I want to show you. Right now is not the time to give up, use this despair as the machine to fuel invention, and with it, brighten the path for all to see.” Thank you for getting this far, and have a great rest of your day!

• Peter Moricz, SPACEGOAT Interactive - hello@spacegoat.com. “Our Story.” Licella, 1 Jan. 1970, www.licella.com.au/our-story/.
• “Licella, BioLogiQ, Mura in Two Deals to Accelerate Cat-HTR Technology Deployment for Post-Consumption Plastic Recycling.” Biofuels Digest, www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2020/01/08/licella-biologiq-mura-in-two-deals-to-accelerate-cat-htr-technology-deployment-for-post-consumption-plastic-recycling/.
• Contents, WA. “EcoLogicStudio Devises a New Domestic Algae Garden Based on the Collection of Data on Air Pollution.” World Architecture Community, World Architecture Community, 10 June 2020, worldarchitecture.org/article-links/efegv/ecologicstudio-devises-a-new-domestic-algae-garden-based-on-the-collection-of-data-on-air-pollution.html.
• “Living Robots Built Using Frog Cells.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, 13 Jan. 2020, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200113175653.htm.