Turning air into plastic?

I remember the 'Anything Into Oil' claims. The article was first posted in 2006, and I thought our environmental concerns were solved.

It has, of course, been eleven years now since that first article, and we're still throwing away trash and pumping oil out of the ground - at increasingly desperate cost to our environment.

So, in the spirit of  'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', I'm not going to hold my breath until the airplastic comes to a store near me and gets the full scientific exploration that it deserves.

And as much as the science of this video from Thuderf00t seems sound, I don't know his bonafides either.

All that being said, the concept of sequestering carbon from the air to make the plastics that we're already using is pretty outstanding. I'm skeptically hopeful.

Why Roman Concrete Still Stands Strong While Modern Version Decays

Concrete, strong stuff...

But apparently Roman concrete is among the strongest stuff, and it just got stronger while it was under seawater.

Previous work had revealed lime particles within the cores that surprisingly contained the mineral aluminous tobermorite – a rare substance that is hard to make.

The mineral, said Jackson, formed early in the history of the concrete, as the lime, seawater and volcanic ash of the mortar reacted together in a way that generated heat.

But now Jackson and the team have made another discovery. “I went back to the concrete and found abundant tobermorite growing through the fabric of the concrete, often in association with phillipsite [another mineral],” she said.

She said this revealed another process that was also at play. Over time, seawater that seeped through the concrete dissolved the volcanic crystals and glasses, with aluminous tobermorite and phillipsite crystallising in their place.

These minerals, say the authors, helped to reinforce the concrete, preventing cracks from growing, with structures becoming stronger over time as the minerals grew.

And it looks like the Romans knew what they were doing.

As the authors note, the Romans were aware of the virtues of their concrete, with Pliny the Elder waxing lyrical in his Natural History that it is “impregnable to the waves and every day stronger”.

If you want to read more, check out the original research article...or the Guardian article that's way more readable and that I quoted up above.

Update: ...or check out a CNN article about the same research.