Canadian teenager Evan Budz has built an autonomous AI robot turtle that swims on its own and detects microplastics in lakes with 94% accuracy. The 16-year-old spent roughly 4,000 hours on the bionic sea turtle and its underwater holographic camera, winning a $50,000 scholarship at the 2026 Regeneron ISEF. His goal: replace slow, expensive lab testing with on-the-spot microplastic detection in remote water bodies.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Canadian teenager Evan Budz has built an autonomous AI robot turtle that swims on its own and detects microplastics in lakes with 94% accuracy. The 16-year-old spent roughly 4,000 hours on the bionic sea turtle and its underwater holographic camera, winning a $50,000 scholarship at the 2026 Regeneron ISEF. His goal: replace slow, expensive lab… Read More »16-yr-old Canadian student built AI robot turtle that hunts plastic invisible to eye<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":123441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsfortnite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}