This year’s Earth Day centers on reducing plastic pollution for the sake of both humanity and planetary health. We spoke with polymer scientist Dr. Katrina Knauer about innovative recycling technologies and the development of new plastics that could make a significant contribution to achieving this mission.

The rise of large language models has generated an online boom in AI-written literature across genres as diverse as bedtime stories for children, sci-fi novellas, autobiographies, and romance novels. But if we can generate entire volumes with nothing but a prompt or two, how will books be conceived in the future? And what impact will ChatGPT have on our notion of literature?