Sustainable formulation polymers for home, beauty and personal care: challenges and opportunities.

As society moves towards a net-zero future, the need to adopt more sustainable polymers is well understood, and as well as plastics, less visible formulation polymers should also be included within this shift. As researchers, industries and consumers move towards more sustainable products there is a clear need to define what sustainability means in fast moving consumer goods and how it can be considered at the design stage. In this perspective key challenges in achieving sustainable formulation polymers are highlighted, and opportunities to overcome them are presented.

A curious formulation robot enables the discovery of a novel protocell behavior.

We describe a chemical robotic assistant equipped with a curiosity algorithm (CA) that can efficiently explore the states a complex chemical system can exhibit. The CA-robot is designed to explore formulations in an open-ended way with no explicit optimization target. By applying the CA-robot to the study of self-propelling multicomponent oil-in-water protocell droplets, we are able to observe an order of magnitude more variety in droplet behaviors than possible with a random parameter search and given the same budget.

Development of a Minimal Photosystem for Hydrogen Production in Inorganic Chemical Cells.

Inorganic chemical cells (iCHELLs) are compartment structures consisting of polyoxometalates (POMs) and cations, offering structured and confined reaction spaces bounded by membranes. We have constructed a system capable of efficient anisotropic and hierarchical photo-induced electron transfer across the iCHELL membrane. Mimicking photosynthesis, our system uses proton gradients between the compartment and the bulk to drive efficient conversion of light into chemical energy, producing hydrogen upon irradiation.

Artificial intelligence exploration of unstable protocells leads to predictable properties and discovery of collective behavior.

Protocell models are used to investigate how cells might have first assembled on Earth. Some, like oil-in-water droplets, can be seemingly simple models, while able to exhibit complex and unpredictable behaviors. How such simple oil-in-water systems can come together to yield complex and life-like behaviors remains a key question.

An all-inorganic polyoxometalate-polyoxocation chemical garden.

Herein, we show it is possible to produce wholly inorganic chemical gardens from a cationic polyoxometalate (POM) seed in an anionic POM solution, demonstrating a wholly POM-based chemical garden system that produces architectures over a wide concentration range. Six concentration dependent growth regimes have been discovered and characterized: clouds, membranes, slugs, tubes, jetting and budding.