'Mysterious disappearance' of young US inventor: Who is 21-year-old Julian Brown? What did he discover?
A 21-year-old Chicago inventor was reportedly missing since early July, though there has been no official confirmation of his missing. But social media users raised alarm that Julian Brown who invented fuel from plastic and had his DIY gas station, had not appeared on his social media accounts for the past two weeks.
And his last message was ominous -- that he was in some trouble.
What did Julian Brown invent?
According to reports, the Black young inventor discovered Plastoline, a solar-powered reactor which is capable of turning everyday plastic into clean-burning fuel. Social media users expressed dismay that he might have been killed in an example of another Black scientist being silenced but there is no report of any such thing. It is also possible that he has withdrawn from social media to concentrate on his work.
What is Plastoline?
Julian Brown was nicknamed as the backyard scientist in Alabama. On social media, Brown goes by the name NatureJab and his company's name of Jab's Pyrolysis & Energy Recovery. In his backyard, he had half a dozen or more sonal panels. His invention is plastic pyrolysis which creates a lot of carbon emissions but less than recycling plastic, he said. In 2024, he suffered second-degree burns during his experiments in which an explosion took place.
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Why social media users think Julian Brown is dead
It is a conspiracy theory based on his last social media post in which he said some very, very odd stuff was happening to him. 'Something is happening keep me in your prayers please SCREEN RECORD THIS. I don't know," he said.
Brown had a GoFundMe page to fund his invention and it raised more than $18,000. 'I have dedicated the last 5 years of my life, starting in high school to this journey. I begun this journey because I saw a huge lack in the industry of all things recycling. We are told recycling is occurring, yet any observance to our natural world would show otherwise," Julian said in March.
'When I was five years old, I told my mom that I was gonna create something that would change the world,' he recalled. 'It's always been within me — I just never knew what it was gonna be," he said in that interview.
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