Science & Technology

Biodegradable nails make manicures more sustainable

Daniel William Strain — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 03:01:44 +0000

Biodegradable nails make manicures more sustainable Daniel William… Wed, 04/02/2025 - 21:01

Daniel Strain , Nicholas Goda

Bio-e-Nails, a more sustainable kind of press-on nails, come in all shapes and colors. (Credit: Living Matter Lab)

Sit down, relax and get your nails done at the sustainability salon.

In a new study, a team of researchers at the �鶹��Ѱ��’s ATLAS Institute has designed a new kind of press-on nails that are biodegradable, colorful and endlessly customizable.

The group’s designs, called Bio-e-Nails, use common ingredients obtained from algae or the hard exteriors of shellfish and other animals. They come in all shapes and sizes: Do you like long and sparkly nails? You can make them yourself in your own kitchen. What about shorter, bright pink nails with built-in computer chips? They’re possible, too.

And, when you’re done with your latest look, you can melt down the nails and make a new set—or whatever else you can imagine, said co-creator Eldy Lázaro Vásquez.

“With Bio-e-Nails, there can be a second life, a third life, a fourth life,” said Lázaro Vásquez, a doctoral student at ATLAS and lead author of the new research. “The material can be remelted and reshaped into new objects. You can make a new nail, for sure, but also a coaster for your coffee cup.”

She and her colleagues unveiled their Bio-e-Nails in March at the 2025 Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) conference in France.

The team’s instructions for making Bio-e-Nails are available for free online. They’re also easy enough that anyone can follow them using craft supplies and ingredients for sale at many grocery stores.

Mirela Alistar, the study’s senior author, explained that creating sustainable fashion doesn’t mean sacrificing functionality or beauty.

“Sustainability goes beyond merely replacing plastic with a substitute material,” said Alistar, assistant professor at ATLAS and the Department of Computer Science. “Both the designer and the user also need to change their mindset. That type of change, which considers the entire lifecycle of the wearable, is what we are tackling through our research in the Living Matter Lab.”

Adding crystals to Bio-e-Nails. (Credit: Living Matter Lab)

A few simple steps

Lázaro Vásquez noted that, for many people, going to the nail salon is an important ritual, and a very visible way to express themselves.

“[Nails] can be a reflection of your personality,” Lázaro Vásquez said. “They represent something that comes from you.”

Eldy Lázaro Vasquez displays Bio-e-Nails during a recent conference in France. (Credit: Living Matter Lab)

Bio-e-Nails are designed for short-term use, making them ideal for a night out. (Credit: Living Matter Lab)

But treating yourself can also come with a downside. Many of the chemicals that nails salons employ can generate air pollutants that pose risks to health of customers and workers. They include methyl methacrylate, which helps acrylic nails bond to your real ones. According to one estimate, the global press-on nails industry is worth nearly $700 million and growing rapidly, which means a lot of plastic waste going into landfills.

“We’re not used to thinking of nails as a waste material because they're so small, but they add up,” Alistar said.

Bio-e-Nails represent a new way of thinking about that process. Julia Tung, an undergraduate student who took a course on biodesign taught by Alistar in 2023, developed a set of bioplastic nails as a class project. Following Tung’s initial explorations, Lázaro Vásquez and her fellow graduate students Sepideh Mohammadi, Latifa Al Naimi and Shira David developed new biomaterial formulations and fabrication methods for their nails.

To make Bio-e-Nails, designers begin with one of two powder ingredients: Agar (which comes from algae and is often used as a vegan substitute for gelatin) or chitosan (which comes from seashells and other animal products and is a common health supplement).

If you’re using chitosan, you first mix that ingredient with vinegar and water, then warm and cool the slurry in a water bath. Next, pour it into a clay mold shaped like your favorite press-on nails. After 48 hours, you’re ready to peel off the thin film and trim away the excess material. (The directions for making agar nails are a little different but just as simple).

Voilá—it’s time to show off those new nails.

Make it your own

Lázaro Vásquez added that Bio-e-Nails are customizable for any aesthetic and can also be interactive.

You can, for example, add food coloring to create nails in bright orange, green, blue or any other color. You might also introduce sparkles or crystals for a bit of extra glam, even making nails that look like a starry night sky. The researchers experimented with incorporating tiny computer chips into Bio-e-Nails. You can then program your smartphone to trigger certain commands when you tap it with your nail—such as displaying the number for your emergency contact or pulling up directions home.

Bio-e-Nails are designed for short-term use, Lázaro Vásquez said, making them ideal for occasions like a night out. The research team proposed three ways to extend the life cycle of the materials, with composting as the last resort. A better option is to reuse those materials for your next look.

“Composting should be the last alternative. We want to keep the materials in use as long as we can,” Lázaro Vásquez said. “In biodesign, it’s not just about replacing traditional materials with biodegradable ones—it’s about rethinking the entire design process, considering the life cycle of the material and eventual products, and how they can stay in circulation and be transformed before they ever return to nature.”

Beyond the story

Our sustainability impact by the numbers:

First student-run campus environmental center in the U.S.
No. 11 university for environmental and social impact in the U.S.
First zero-waste major sports stadium in the U.S.

Follow �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder on LinkedIn

A new kind of press-on nails comes in all shapes and colors—and when you’re done with them, you can melt them down and reuse the materials to make your next look.

Zebra Striped

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Dialing in the temperature needed for precise nuclear timekeeping

Megan Maneval — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 14:28:16 +0000

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For decades, atomic clocks have been the pinnacle of precision timekeeping, enabling GPS navigation, cutting-edge physics research and tests of fundamental theories. But researchers at JILA, in collaboration with the Technical University of Vienna, are pushing beyond atomic transitions to something potentially even more stable: a nuclear clock.

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New technology turns waste heat into electricity, defies physical limit

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New sensor can take any gas and tell you what’s in it

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 17:22:06 +0000

New sensor can take any gas and tell you what’s in it Daniel William… Wed, 02/19/2025 - 10:22

Daniel Strain

Expert sommeliers can take a whiff of a glass of wine and tell you a lot about what’s in your pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon.

A team of physicists at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have achieved a similar feat of sensing, only for a much wider range of substances.

The group has developed a new laser-based device that can take any sample of gas and identify a huge variety of the molecules within it. It is sensitive enough to detect those molecules at minute concentrations all the way down to parts per trillion. Its design is also simple enough that researchers could employ the method quickly and at a low cost in a range of settings, from diagnosing illnesses in human patients to tracking greenhouse gas emissions from factories.

Qizhong Liang in Jun Ye's lab at JILA on the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder campus. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

Jun Ye (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

The study was led by scientists at JILA, a joint research institute between �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and NIST. The team published its findings on Feb. 19 in the journal Nature.

“Even today I still find it unbelievable that the most capable sensing tool can in fact be built with such simplicity, using only mature technical ingredients but tied together with a clever computation algorithm,” said Qizhong Liang, lead author of the research and a doctoral student at JILA.

To show what the tool is capable of, Liang and his colleagues drilled down on an important question in medicine: What’s in the air you breathe out?

The researchers analyzed breath samples from real human subjects and showed that they could, for example, identify the types of bacteria living in peoples’ mouths. The technique could one day help doctors diagnose lung cancer, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and much more.

Physicist Jun Ye, senior author of the study, said the new work builds on nearly three decades of research into quantum physics at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and NIST—especially around a type of specialized device known as a frequency comb laser.

“The Frequency comb laser was originally invented for optical atomic clocks, but very early on, we identified its powerful application for molecular sensing,” said Ye, a fellow of JILA and NIST and professor adjoint of physics at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder. “Still, it took us 20 years to mature this technique, finally allowing universal applicability for molecular sensing.”

A shaking cavity

To understand how the team’s technology works, it helps to understand that all gases, from pure carbon dioxide to your stinky breath after you eat garlic, carry a fingerprint of sorts.

If you probe those gases with a laser that spans multiple “optical frequencies,” or colors, the molecules in the gas samples will absorb that light at different frequencies. It’s almost like a burglar leaving behind a thumbprint at a crime scene. In a previous study, for example, Liang and his colleagues used this laser absorption detection principle to screen human breath samples for signs of SARS-CoV-2 infections.

Frequency combs are well suited to that technique because, unlike traditional lasers, they emit pulses of light in thousands to millions of colors at the same time. (JILA’s Jan Hall pioneered these lasers, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in 2005).

But to detect molecules at low concentrations, those lasers must also pass through the gas sample over distances of miles or more so that the molecules can absorb enough light.

To be practical, scientists must realize that distance within containers for gases that are measured on the scale of a foot.

“We enclose the gas sample with a pair of high-reflectivity mirrors, forming an ‘optical cavity,’” Liang said. “The comb light can now bounce between those mirrors several thousand times to effectively increase its absorption path length with the molecules.”

Or that’s the goal. In practice, optical cavities are tricky to work with and eject laser beams if they aren’t properly matched to the resonant modes of the cavity. As a result, scientists previously could only use a narrow range of comb light, and detect a narrow range of molecules, in a single test.

In previous research, Ye, Liang and their colleagues used specialized lasers to detect signs of COVID-19 infections in human breath. (Credit: NIST)

In the new study, Liang and his colleagues overcame this longstanding challenge. They presented a new technique they named Modulated Ringdown Comb Interferometry, or MRCI (pronounced “mercy”). Rather than keep its optical cavity steady, the team periodically changed its size. This jiggling, in turn, allowed the cavity to accept a much wider spectrum of light. The team then deciphered the complicated laser intensity patterns emerging from the cavity with computational algorithms to determine the samples’ chemical contents.

“We can now use mirrors with even larger reflectivity and send in comb light with even broader spectral coverage,” Liang said. “But this is just the beginning. Even better sensing performance can be established using MRCI.”

A sensor for breath

The team is now turning its new gas sniffer on human breath.

“Exhaled breath is one of the most challenging gas samples to be measured, but characterizing its molecular compositions is highly important for its powerful potential for medical diagnostics,” said Apoorva Bisht, co-author of the research and a doctoral student in Ye’s lab.

Bisht, Liang and Ye are now collaborating with researchers at �鶹��Ѱ��Anschutz Medical Campus and Children’s Hospital Colorado to use MRCI to analyze a range of breath samples. They are examining whether MRCI can distinguish samples taken from children with pneumonia from those taken from children with asthma. The group is also analyzing the breath of lung cancer patients before and after tumor removal surgery and is exploring whether the technology can diagnose people in early stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

“It will be tremendously important to validate our approach on real world human subjects,” Ye said. “Through close collaboration with our medical colleagues at �鶹��Ѱ��Anschutz, we are committed to developing the full potential of this technique for medical diagnosis.”

A new laser-based device can scan almost any sample of gas and detect its molecular ingredients down to concentrations in the parts per trillion—not unlike an expert sommelier taking a sniff of a glass of wine.

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Expanded opportunities for innovation and partnerships at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder

Megan Maneval — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:23:44 +0000

Expanded opportunities for innovation and partnerships at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Megan Maneval Mon, 02/17/2025 - 07:23

The Research & Innovation Office announced a targeted realignment in November to enhance strategic integration across key areas and best position itself to serve the university's growing research and innovation needs.

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Biodegradable nails make manicures more sustainable

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