NSFW: Plastics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

I know, I know.

I've promised that I would only post videos and articles that are safe for work.

This one definitively breaks that self-imposed rule. This one should NOT be shown to students at school unless you have a really good relationship with your Board of Education and some pretty mature students.

The video mentions - as comedic asides - sex toys, numerous f-bombs, loads of s-bombs ('shot' but with a different vowel), and cheapshots at the blobfish.

But there's a whole lot of actual content about the environmental horrors of our plastic obsession, our lack of recycling in the face of more and more claims of recycling, the advertising push from the plastics industry to convince us all that the lack of recycling is our individual faults (including the famous crying Italian-American commercial, the route that plastics take into our stomach and body, the US's refusal to sign onto plastic waste reduction treaties, the movement to pass extended producer responsibility bills.

The video is well worth watching. There's good content in there. And I'll admit to enjoying the crass humor.

Bike tires that last a lifetime without any puncture or degradation are inspired by NASA's rover technology

 

I've posted about the NASA rover's memory metal ties on the blog before, and we certainly know that technology developed for the space program often makes its way into our everyday life. So it's not a total shock that those tires would be finding their way into use here on the Earth.

But I wouldn't have bet that the first Earthly use for this tire technology would be on bicycles.

Who knew?

As this article writes, "The airless METL bike tires are crafted out of the Shape Memory Alloy Radial Technology (SMART) – made from strong (like titanium), lightweight yet ultra-elastic material (like rubber) known as NiTinol+."

The METL tires come from The Smart Tire Technology Company and aren't available just yet, though they are taking names for the waitlist. I'm really curious how much those tires would cost and whether they would adaptable from one bike to the next one that a cyclist would purchase. Otherwise, it might not necessarily be a great investment.

How Used Chopsticks Are Turned Into Tables, Tiles, and Other Furniture | World Wide Waste

 I think we're all aware that we use too much stuff. 

Admittedly, the wood that we're using probably isn't the worst of that stuff. If we could use a little less wood and maybe reuse some of the wood that we are using, it might be a little better for our planet, though.

This video shows the process through which ChopValue turns used chopsticks - primarily around Vancouver - into floor tiles and tabletops. It's actually fascinating.

Columbia's Lego Homes - earthrise

They aren't Lego bricks at all.

They're interlocking bricks made of recycled plastic collected on the streets of Columbia.

That doesn't make them Lego-brick-built houses any more than me strapping rubber mats onto my feet mean I'm wearing Nike shoes.

Semantics aside, the interlocking bricks look pretty cool. I am curious about their R value, but that's a different question.

The above video, by the way, was accompanied by an article with a more information and still photos.

Meet Stephanie Kwolek, the woman who gave us bulletproof vests and yoga pants

Source - https://twitter.com/SpringerNature/status/1156489739903676417

Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar

It's a pretty outstanding title for a chyron.

It's pithier than "the fourth woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame."

It's more widely understandable than "only female winner of DuPont's Lavoisier Medal" (as of 2020, at least).

It's far pithier than "inventor of poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide", the actual chemical name of Kevlar.

In my world, though, all of those are less important than "invented the nylon rope demonstration" that I use in the classroom every year and throughout the summers.

Read some more about Stephanie Kwolek

• from Massive Science
• from Forbes
• from the Smithsonian
• from Wikipedia

Graphene science | Mikael Fogelström | TEDxGöteborg

I am becoming more and more curious as to whether the TEDx events in countries other than America are all conducted in English.

If so, that's both awesome for us English-only speakers and kind of dismissive of those non-American countries. I'm just saying. (I'm also incredibly impressed by multi-lingual people.)

"Graphene is the material of superlatives."

That's a fine description of graphene - and also a not useful description. It's the most stable, strongest, best electrical and thermal conductor, transparentest, impermeable material around. That's interesting, but until I start to see graphene actually being used to make something I use better, I'm holding back on my excitement for what graphene actually can do for us. 

It's theoretically neat and experimentally cool, but it's only theoretically useful for now.

Yes, there might one day be transparent electronics, remarkably strong but lightweight composites for airplanes, better batteries and capacitors for electric vehicles, instantaneous DNA sequencing (as the video shows at 7:30)...maybe...

(I do warn you that this video is a little less exciting as far as TED presentations go. The ideas are amazing and theoretically world-changing, but the speaker is - in his at least second language - less dynamic than he could be.)

Quicksilver and Slow Death

 

Source - "Quicksilver and Slow Death" - National Geographic, October 1972

I'm just going to let that picture sit there for a moment.

Feel free to scroll down once you've absorbed the fascination, curiosity, intrigue, and abject terror of the sight of a man sitting on a pool of mercury with seemingly no protective equipment at all.

I'll wait.

That's the picture that sent me down a rabbit hole a few years back. I came across the photo somewhere - I've no clue where other than 'on the internet' - and wanted to track down its origins. Who took that? Where were they? Why were they sitting on mercury? When the heck was it taken?

Eventually I came across a source saying that the image came from National Geographic's October 1972 issue in the article "Quicksilver and Slow Death".

At the time, hunting down the article with images was fairly difficult as I hadn't found full text scans of articles in library databases just yet.

So I headed to ebay and spent about $6 buying a copy of the magazine so I could read the original article.

It turned out to be fascinating.

Here's the original caption for the photo.

Floating on mercury, a veteran miner demonstrates the metal's high density - 13.5 times that of water. Mercury's great cohesiveness prevents it from wetting skin or clothes. Being liquid, however, it penetrates the finest crevices. Once out of the vat, the man turned out his pockets and shed his showed to shake out droplets of theś metal.

The article surveys the historical ideas of mercury...

Arabian and European alchemists deemed mercury one of the two "contraries" (the other was sulphur) that combined deep in the earth to form all other elements.

...the health hazards of mining mercury...

In one room [of the miner's hospital] the walls were lined with powerful lamps, the floor marked with a circular path. "The miners call this the 'beach,' " Don Jeśus told me. "Sometimes a man inhales too much mercury vapor in the mine and develops a tremor. If it's a sever case, the doctors send him here for treatment.

"He strips and walks round and round in the heat, sweating out the mercury. Most respond rapidly and are returned to work. A few don't; they are pensioned."

...and the health hazards of exposure to mercury, particularly from eating contaminated fish, pork, or grain...

Borne by the bloodstream, methyl mercury penetrates brain membranes that bar most other poisons. First, it damages the organ without appreciable loss of cells, then erodes whole pockets of tissue. Worst hit are the brain's visual, hearing, and equilibrium centers, thus explaining the effects of mercury poisoning - blindness, deafness, and loss of balance.

The article closes with this warning, from Dr Alf Johnels, 

"It was a matter of human failure. We cannot see beyond immediate needs: Mercury did the job, so we used it and trusted the earth to absorb in. Not until people and birds died did we find out how wrong we were.

"If mercury were the only pollutant, that would be one thing. But every day we're pouring into our environment tons of other substances - cadmium, lead, industrial chemical like the polychlorinated biphenyls called PCB's. Some are stable and will be with us a long time. And we have no idea what their long-term effect will be.

"We who work in museums know about vanishing species - they are here, as always, then one dat they are gone. Their environment has changed.

"Only if we think in terms of generations, and are willing to pay the price of keeping the world clean of our our foulings, can we have confidence that man will not join that list of vanishing species."

If you want to read the full article - it's dated but outstanding - here it is in full.

"Quicksilver and Slow Death" - NatGo - Oct 1972 by phschemguy on Scribd