Google Science Fair Teen Found Way to Remove Microplastics from Water

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Google Science Fair teen found way to remove microplastics from water:

Fionn Ferreira lives on a remote island in West Cork, a seaside region in southern Ireland. One day while kayaking, he spotted a rock on the shore that was coated in oil from a recent spill. Attached to the rock were tiny bits of plastic less than 5 millimeters long - what scientists call "microplastics."

[...] Because microplastics are so small - about the size of a sesame seed - scientists have struggled to find ways to remove them from the environment. But Ferreira discovered something when he saw the oil-coated rock on the shore.

[...] Plastic and oil are nonpolar, meaning they're likely to stick to one another in nature. As a budding scientist, Ferreira had a hunch that the same effect could be created using a magnetic liquid found in speakers and electronic devices.

On Monday, Ferreira won the Google Science Fair's $50,000 grand prize for his experiment, which showed that the liquid could extract microplastics from water.

[...] In 1963, the NASA engineer Steve Papell came up with a way to make rocket fuel magnetic so that it could move around in zero gravity during the Apollo missions. In the process, he wound up creating the first ferrofluid, essentially a magnetic liquid.

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