Skip to Content

Mixing Darks with Lights

Because most recycling centers don’t accept dark-colored plastics, more than four billion kilograms of car bumpers, cell phones and other materials clog U.S. landfills each year. Black plastic could easily be recycled. The problem: the polymers used in different plastics are incompatible, and melting them together yields an unusable glop. But the conventional plastic-identification method of analyzing reflected laser light doesn’t work well with black plastic, which chars under the bright beam.

SpectraCode of West Lafayette, IN, may have solved the problem. The key is a laser beam that hops around. The beam can be bright enough to produce an identifying signal rapidly; by dancing from point to point roughly every tenth of a second, it never dwells on one spot long enough to burn it. SpectraCode CEO Edward Grant expects the probe to be used in commercial products by early 2002.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.