There are many types of plastics that we use directly or indirectly in our daily lives. Of the many types of plastics, thermosets are some of the toughest. These are plastics that are very durable and are heat-resistant. These features, however, are also what makes them very difficult to break down and recycle. But scientists may just have found a way to break this plastic down, while keeping its original strength.

The study suggests that by changing the way they're made, we could keep the original strength of these thermosets, but make them able to be broken down and recycled.

Currently, around 75 percent of the plastic we use in items such as plastic wrappers and plastic bags can be broken down and then reused. But thermosets, which are found in things such as car parts, aren't reusable.

The new approach involves slightly adjusting the mixture that makes up thermoset plastic, adding particular types of building blocks (or monomers) called silyl ethers that are more susceptible to being pulled apart and reshaped.

More details about this over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: Cjp24/ Wikimedia Commons)

On August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima by the bomber plane Enola Gay. An estimated 90,000 to 120,000 are said to have died, either instantaneously or over the following days, because of the atomic bomb. Three days later, another atomic bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki, killing around 60,000 to 70,000.

There were some people who survived these horrifying events, and they came to be known in Japanese as hibakusha. Unfortunately, while they may have survived the atomic bombs, they could not escape the deadly effects of the radiation caused by them. Nevertheless, their suffering was not in vain.

Collectively, they have left an important legacy. Most of what is known today about the long-term health effects of radiation has come out of research with those survivors. The work, now run by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), is making “major contributions to our understanding of radiation effects,” even today, says Richard Wakeford, a radiation epidemiologist at the University of Manchester. RERF studies also underpin the limits that countries have set for occupational and medical exposure to radiation.

Meet some of the survivors and read their stories over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Tests and exams just might be the universal method of measuring a person’s ability, knowledge, or intelligence. For both the child and the adult, tests are to be taken seriously when the stakes are high. And since some tests have high stakes, some people, old or young, resort to cheating. But how do we identify these people? Who is more likely to cheat?

This is what researchers from the University of Santiago de Compostela tried to answer. They reported that…

…the people most likely to cheat were the ones with a personality that can only be described as lazy, or low on conscientiousness. The cheaters were also lower on the trait of agreeableness, meaning that they weren’t particularly nice people.

This profile of student cheaters helps to provide insight into why some young people take such a dishonest approach to education. The question is, however, do they “grow out” of this behavior or do they continue to be cheaters throughout their adult lives?

More details about this over at Psychology Today.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: Pixabay)

Graceful, quick-witted, flexible, and just overall amazing, Olympic figure skaters are indeed spectacular performers. Passionate at what they are good at, they put their all on every action, may it be a twist or a spin, and along with it, their facial expressions, too!

See the funny pictures over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

American poet William Carlos Williams is most famous for his short work "This Is Just To Say", which goes as follows:

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

It's quite an adventure and thus the basis for an excellent video game by Calum Rodger, which is free and playable in your browser. Drag the character around the kitchen and click on objects to interact with them. Eat as many plums as you can.

-via Nag on the Lake

The Walking Dead season ten was abruptly truncated due to the coronavirus lockdown after 15 episodes. The last scheduled episode was put on pause. Now, during the virtual San Diego Comic Con, AMC's Walking Dead symposiums have revealed what the franchise has planned. First off, the episode we were missing will air on October 10. Watch the first few minutes of it here.

Note I did not say that The Walking Dead “finale” will air on October 4th, because — twist — it will no longer be the finale. At Comic-Con, Angela Kang also announced that, although production has not yet begun, the plan is to add an additional six episodes to season 10, which will air in 2021. It sounds like, instead of jumping to season 11 in its traditional February slot, the series will add additional season 10 episodes in the Spring and, presumably if all goes well, begin season 11 in the fall.

Following the singular Walking Dead episode on October 10, the new spinoff series Walking Dead: World Beyond will premiere, followed by The Talking Dead. Fear the Walking Dead will begin its season six the next day, on October 11th. The Comic Con trailer is here. Also read some details of what you can expect to see.

As global temperatures rise up as our planet gets warmer and warmer, it is no surprise that our icebergs, and even places under permafrost, are starting to melt. Places such as Alaska have suffered much over the years because of this phenomenon, as documented by this study published recently in Nature Publishing Group journal Climate and Atmospheric Science. The study compared how rainfall affects permafrost thaw “across time, space, and a variety of ecosystems”.

As Siberia remains in the headlines for record-setting heat waves and wildfires, Alaska is experiencing the rainiest five years in its century-long meteorological record. Extreme weather on both ends of the spectrum—hot and dry versus cool and wet—are driven by an aspect of climate change called Arctic amplification. As the earth warms, temperatures in the Arctic rise faster than the global average.

While the physical basis of Arctic amplification is well understood, it is less known how it will affect the permafrost that underlies about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, including most of Alaska. Permafrost locks about twice the carbon that is currently in the atmosphere into long-term storage and supports Northern infrastructure like roads and buildings; so understanding how a changing climate will affect it is crucial for both people living in the Arctic and those in lower latitudes.

More details about this saddening news over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: National Park Service/ Wikimedia Commons)

Connections play an essential role when it comes to being successful in career and, pretty much, life in general. This is why we humans devote a significant portion of our time building relationships and connections with other people. It’s not only humans who practice this, however, as animals, such as dolphins, also do this.

Researchers at Georgetown University and Duke University report that dolphins under age 10 seek out peers and activities that could help them forge bonds and build skills they'll need in adulthood.

The results were published July 14 in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

The team analyzed nearly 30 years' worth of records for more than 1700 wild bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay in Western Australia. Since the 1980s, researchers have been taking boats out into this remote bay and noting things like the sex, age and behavior of any dolphins they encountered.

[...]

The study revealed that, even though young dolphins flit from group to group as often as every ten minutes throughout the day, they tend to spend more time with a few close friends.

More details about the study over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Madison Miketa, PhD, Shark Bay Dolphin Project/ EurekAlert)

In the year 1980, the World Health Organization declared that they had finally eradicated smallpox. Ever since then, no naturally occurring smallpox has been reported. But before this triumphant year, smallpox was a dreaded disease. Said to be responsible for the death of around 500 million people across the globe, I could only imagine how people were fearful of this disease.

This recent study has uncovered ancient traces of the variola virus (the virus that causes smallpox) in the remains of some Northern Europeans that lived during the Viking Age. It is thought of that some of these were Vikings themselves.

The new finding pushes back the proven record of smallpox infecting people by almost 1,000 years, to the year 603.

Researchers had previously discovered ancient traces of variola virus DNA in a mummy from the mid-1600s, which put the common origin of modern strains in the 16th or 17th century...

The team reconstructed nearly complete genetic blueprints of four of the 11 ancient viruses, which reveal that the Viking-era strains belong to a now-extinct group of variola viruses. During that period, smallpox may have been widespread throughout Europe and could have caused serious disease... It’s also possible that if Vikings were infected, they may have spread the disease as they traveled. 

More details about this over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: Thames Valley Archaeological Services/ ScienceNews)

It seems that many people in the UK have decided to learn a new hobby while on lockdown, as sales of musical instruments and equipment in the country have increased by 80 percent between April and June.

According to Gear4Music’s chief exec Andrew Wass, electric and acoustic guitar starter packs were a go-to for many people looking to pick up a new instrument. And electric pianos and keyboards were also right up there in terms of instruments people chose…

Speaking to BBC, Wass pointed out that people over lockdown seemed keen to have a hobby “they can get into”.

“Maybe they played music at school and have found themselves indoors and decided to come back to it,” he said.

Knowing that music has great benefits to one’s mental health, I can see why people started to learn or get back to music in these challenging times.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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People in both the United States and the United Kingdom generally speak English, but there are plenty of words whose definitions have changed on one side of the pond or the other. If you are going to communicate with someone who speaks a different dialect than what you are used to, it would help to know which words may be confusing. Here are a few examples.  

3. Pants

It’s fine for a man to wander outside in America wearing nothing but pants. In Britain? Not so much. In the U.S., pants go on top of underpants or underwear, which are called pants in the UK. Brits wear trousers over pants.

4. Jumper

If you’re an American who read the British version of the Harry Potter series, you probably wondered why all the boys so often wore jumpers. In the UK, a jumper is a sweater, not a sleeveless dress that goes over a blouse (that’s a pinafore).

The list at Mental Floss covers more than just clothing, but it doesn't explain why a man named Randy should go by Randall when visiting Britain, nor exactly which body part a fanny is. But it will tell you something you probably don't already know.

James Defty salvaged an engine nacelle from a Vickers VC10 operated by the Royal Air Force. He converted it into a camping trailer.

A strange 12th-century incident occurred in what is now Germany that I had never heard before, and might pique your interest.

The Erfurt latrine disaster was an event that occurred in Erfurt, Duchy of Thuringia in 1184. A number of nobles from across the Holy Roman Empire were meeting in a room at the Church of St. Peter, when their combined weight caused the floor to collapse into the latrine beneath the cellar and led to dozens of nobles drowning in liquid excrement. At least 60 people died in the accident.[1]

Now, we can assume that many of those 60 people died from injuries incurred in the fall, but drowning in a latrine has to be one of the worst ways to go. Read more about this tragedy at Wikipedia. And then be thankful for modern building codes and sanitary plumbing.  -via reddit

(Image credit: GFreihalter)

Neatorama readers are familiar with Colma, the town built as a graveyard to store San Francisco's dead when the city ran out of room around 1900. The same thing happened even earlier in London. Even though Europe's burial practices included exhuming the dead so that graves could be used again, there was a limit to how many could be interred at once. London decided to solve the problem by opening a huge graveyard outside the city.    

As a result a proposal was drawn up to use the emerging technology of mechanised transport to resolve the crisis. The scheme entailed buying a single very large tract of land around 23 miles from London to be called  the London Necropolis (now Brookwood Cemetery). At this distance, the land would be far beyond the maximum projected size of the city's growth. If the practice of only burying a single family in each grave were abandoned and the traditional practice for pauper burials of ten burials per grave were adopted, the site was capable of accommodating 28,500,000 bodies. Even with the prohibition of mass graves it would take over 350 years to fill a single layer of this monstrous cemetery!

Using parts of the existing London and South Western Railway, trains could ship bodies and mourners from London to the site easily and cheaply. Its founders envisaged dedicated coffin trains, each carrying 50–60 bodies, travelling from London to the new Necropolis in the early morning or late at night, and the coffins being stored on the cemetery site until the time of the funeral. Mourners would then be carried to the appropriate part of the cemetery by a dedicated passenger train during the day.

The scheme found widespread support, although the Bishop of London considered it inappropriate that the families of people from very different backgrounds would potentially have to share a train, and felt that it demeaned the dignity of the deceased for the bodies of respectable members of the community to be carried on a train also carrying the bodies and relatives of those who had led immoral lives.

The new cemetery opened in 1854. Funerals and transport varied in price depending on one's station in life. Read about the rise and fall of London's Necropolis Railway at  HistoryASM. -via Strange Company

With no humans visiting the zoo to keep them occupied, staff at the Newquay Zoo in Cornwall, England had been looking for ways to keep their resident penguins entertained. Thankfully, a patron donated a bubble machine to the zoo, and the zoo staff used the device wisely.

Penguin caretaker Dan Trevelyan said the bubbles help to keep the penguins’s predatory reflexes sharp.

“In the wild, these guys are marine predators who are very sensitive to objects and movement,” said Trevelyan. “The bubble machine is fantastic, as all the movement and new shapes and colors really stimulate these guys. They have a great time chasing them around. And all these donations are really appreciated.”

The bubbles, which cause no harm to the animals, have in the past also proved popular with the Zoo’s squirrel monkeys and Sulawesi crested macaques.

Wholesome!

(Image Credit: SWNS/ Good News Network)