Plastic-eating Fungi: Solution to Overflowing Landfills?

A natural solution to the widespread problem of plastic waste? Bring it on.

The world is fast becoming a resting place for hearty plastic built to last, and last, and last. With the population and waste count both rising, we need a solution to the growing problem of waste, waste, waste.

Seems we might just have one, in the form of Pestalotiopsis microspora, a fungi discovered to have incredible polyurethane-eating properties. This was the report from a group of Yale students on academic sojourn in Ecuador. Part of the university's annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory enterprise, the group studied plants in their native environment and then brought back cultures of the teeny, tiny things they found inside the plants. In this case, they found fungi that have a voracious appetite for polyurethane, which is used to make a massive number of things in today's society.

Better yet, the fungi thrives in anaerobic conditions — meaning in the relatively oxygen-free environment of a vastly populated landfill. So the theory is this: Pile up all the shoes, garden hoses, toys, airplane wings, and all manner of other things that don't break down easily in a few generations; add some polyurethane-eating fungi; expect to see a reduction in the heap of garbage. It's that simple, apparently.

More data are needed, to be sure, and it's not exactly a straight line from these results to a plastic-eating fungi collection in everyone's back yard. But it's a start.

Get Your Warmth Fix with Clothes Made from Coffee

I'm not exactly down with the company name, but I can look past it to see the benefit of the products.

The products are a line of clothing made from coffee beans. Wear these base layers and you're guaranteed to experience warmer skin, warmer body temperature, and a warmer disposition — all in one java hit. The clothing line is better named &#151StayWarm. Among the nine items are a long-sleeved fitted top, a long-sleeve compression crew neck, a boot-cut three-quarter length compression pant, a sleeveless top, and performance boxers. Prices range from $30.50 to $60.99.

The ingredient of choice is Coffee Char, which is coffee grounds recycled and then processed to make the fiber at the heart of the fabric. The result is clothing that keeps you warm while wicking moisture away from your skin. Adding to the list of best-of-all-possible properties are UV shielding and anti-odor elements.

The company encourages you to use these items as a base layer and not rely on them for your only clothing (especially with the boxers, if you go into the wide world).

Now if they could just change the company name from Virus ...

$400,000 T-shirt: Wash with Care

You can appreciate the irony: a T-shirt that costs $400,000 is made, the company wants you to know, from renewable energy sources.

That's the word from the aptly named Superlative Luxury, which has lovingly crafted a shirt with 16 diamonds attached. Eight are white. Eight are black. All weigh more than 1 carat. 

Still have the money in your checking account? Have a big credit limit on a credit card? This one's for you. Be the first (and potentially only) one on your block to sport this uber-bling.

It might cost you a bit more than you think, however, especially if you pay on credit, because even though you've paid, you don't get the shirt for a month — because, the company says, they need that time to lovingly craft each and every shirt. (And you can be sure that the demand for this item will be so high that the back orders will be piling up.)

The warranty on this item is a full year, which should be long enough to get your money's worth, unless you decide to store it in a safe or behind a glass frame on a wall somewhere. But beware: You won't be able to get a refund. Your many happy returns won't include getting your money back, no matter how much you suffer buyer's remorse.

Big Ben Is Leaning; Time to Worry

As tempting as it is, I can't blame global warming for this one: Big Ben is leaning.

Yes, that venerable symbol of British power and precise time-keeping will, if not fixed in the relatively not-too-distant future, fall over. But that's 10,000 years from now, according to the people who do the measuring and the worrying.

It's not a lot, but 46 centimeters is still enough to have certain people worried. The clock tower is, after all, 96 meters (314 feet) tall. So presumably, the fall will be a gradual one and could be observed and measured, if not fixed. That would be certainly be something of a tourist attraction: "Come see Big Ben tip a fraction of a millimeter before your very eyes!" As it turns out, you can see the lean with your own eyes, if you look at it just right and clench your teeth at just the right tension. Why someone hasn't lined up the tourist option before is a bit of a mystery.

But the main concern to me is the effect on time that this leaning will undoubtedly have, if left to the devices of gravity. If Big Ben is leaning, it's quite possible that time is affected. 

Like many people, I depend on the clock inside Big Ben — the tower is the one with the name, by the way, and the clock is just the clock — to tell me the important things in life: what time it is, when to eat a snack, who will win the Olympic ice dancing. If this clock is leaning and left to keep leaning, then I fear for the clock's ability to tell us anything with certainty, especially the time. In these days of smartphones and leap-seconds, any time lost or misplaced is a big worry. Einstein it was that talked of bent space-time and relative time loss. Time is precious, especially when it's disappearing. 

Dedicated Diggers Net Paltry Payout from ATM

Now this is just sad. So much hard work resulted in so little payoff.

Seems a group of thieves in England spent half a year doing it the old-fashioned way — digging a tunnel in the dead of night, hiding their efforts from passers-by, wincing at every loud sound they were making as if that would be the thing that would give them away and get them noticed and arrested and incarcerated and all manner of other harmful and woefully bad things.

They weren't exactly roughing it. They put in roof supports, so the tunnel wouldn't collapse mid-dig. They also put in lighting, so they could see in the dark and keep on going when they needed to most.

And, in a new-school twist, they went on all high-tech and drilled tiny holes into the store's floor so they could stick in little cameras to see how far away they were from paydirt. 

See, the target was an ATM machine in Manchester. So the thieves tunneled under a parking lot and a video shop — 100 feet in all — to get to the ATM. Then, they opened up the machine and found … only 6,000 pounds. (The bank knows it was only 6,000 pounds because of electronic records.)

Yes, you could argue that with the exchange rate, that's actually … but that's not the point. The point is that these guys (and I'm assuming that it was guys here because women would probably know better) spent half a year of their lives on an ingenious get-rich-quick scheme and didn't get either part of that promise — they didn't get rich, and it certainly wasn't quick. In fact, these guys probably lost money in the end, if you factor in the cost of the roof supports, the lighting, and the telescopic cameras. If that doesn't get it, then you can calculate the time and effort they spent as labor, which has to count for something.

And yet all they got was a measly 6,000 pounds. Yes, that's a lot of money to some people (and it would be a lot of money to me, too, quite frankly). But these guys put a lot of blood and sweat into this job and all they got, really, was tears.

New Year's Eve Always on Saturday? Party on

It's not a bad idea, really. It just needs to get past the thousands of employees who would be put out of work because of it.

It is an idea put forward by a couple of well-meaning professors at Johns Hopkins University. Their idea is to make the calendar into a 364-day thing of beauty, which has the same dates on the same days of the week, every year. Christmas would be on a Sunday every year, as would New Year's Day. Public holidays would have the same date each year, and so on.

It's the bright idea of an economist and an astrophysicist, so this idea isn't lacking in the brainpower behind it. It's not like these guys just dashed something off. No, they spent several years poring over the details, eventually deciding to remove one day from the annual calendar and then make up for it by adding an extra week every few years. (Trust them, it works.)

The months would travel in cycles of three, with the first two having 30 and then the third having 31. Months four and five would have 30, and month six would have 31. You get the idea. But rather than adding that pesky Leap Day every four years, the calendar gurus decided to save them all up and have an extra week at the end of December every fix or six years. (Not sure what they're calling those days, other than Extra Day 1, Extra Day 2, etc.) Again, that's not the point. These guys have it figured out.

OK, so they know their numbers and they know their sun-moon-weekday dynamics. What they don't quite have worked out is the somewhat significant detail that they'd have to change the minds of millions of people all round the world. 

Some people like their September having only 30 days in it. Some people want their July 4 to be on a weekend two out of every seven years. (And in case you're wondering, these guys didn't go anywhere near Easter. That's a whole different kettle of fish.) Why should these people go away from something that they know like the back of their hand?

See, this is always the hard part isn't it — the marketing. You get a great idea and you put all your blood, sweat, and tears into it and then nobody knows about it or, worse, nobody cares. If people already have the iPhone 4S, why do they want your knock-off? They might like the fact that it's a bit quirky and you never know what Siri is going to say next. Why would they want your boring phone, which says the same thing every Sunday? 

What this also means, of course, is that once you buy a calendar, you won't have to buy another one. If you really have to include the year on your calendar (as if you can't remember once you've got the hang of it, along about April), then you can buy the calendar that has the year on it (instead of crossing out the last one or two digits every year and writing in your own version of currency). I could see buying a calendar every time you add the Extra Week, but that's still one every five or six years. 

And all of that means that an entire industry would nearly go out of business. Think of the millions of dollars spent each year around the world on the production and use of this year's calendar. Surely big business would have something to say about this permanent calendar business. If they have their way, this grand experiment would never see the light of day in any meaningful way.

The calendar gurus are confident, though. One of them has a history of changing people's minds, as a financial advisor in several countries in which people eventually decided to change currencies. They also think that time is on their side.

For these two, the calendar is just not a field full of daydreams. Their mantra could well be, if you build it, they will come.

You can read more about it here.

It Never Happened: Scientists 'Cloak' Time for a Split-second

Blink and you miss it, or maybe you never saw it at all.

Scientists at Cornell University have been playing around with time again, and they've managed to "hide" an event by bending the surrounding speed of light. It's not so much an invisibility cloak as it is a time cloak, something that covers its tracks so the human eye isn't even aware that it has missed anything.

The scientists took the speed of beams of light and sped some up while keeping the others the same. All the beams of light were moving too fast for the human eye to track, of course, so the scientists used machines to do the tracking. But the beams that were moving faster created a gap in space and time. The slower beams would be a bit closer to what our human eyes would be able to process, and the machines tracking the slower beams perceived no difference. 

Yet something happened, for 40 picoseconds, at least. (That's trillionths of a second.) Except that nothing happened, depending on which instruments you check.

So what's the big deal? A whole 40 trillionths of a second is anything to sneeze at. (In fact, a sneeze takes a lot longer than that to go through all of its motions.) Well, the scientists say they're aiming to make the time gap bigger, like maybe in the millionths of a second. They'd still need machines to prove that that happened. Come to think of it, they'd need machines to prove that it happened even in "real" time, since our eyes wouldn't pick up the difference anyway.

Read more about it in this week's Nature. 

Kids Color the Room Dotty at Art Museum

There's art for art's sake, and then art for kids' sake. Combine the two, and you get a riot of color.

That's what happened at the Queensland Art Gallery, when Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama painted a room white and then turned loose a bunch of children armed with stickers of colored dots. Also in the room were a piano and a table and chairs, also painted white. They are now also covered in colored dots.

It's called the Obliteration Room. It's interactive art at its most colorful, and it's part of the ongoing exhibit "Look Now, See Forever" at the QAG's Gallery of Modern Art.

I have to say from looking at the photo for a good long while that I much prefer this riot of color to the splash-fests of Jackson Polock (although that might be just personal preference).

You could argue that the artist didn't do it all herself, and you'd be right. But she did provide the backdrop and the means of creation, it certainly added a varied perspective to what might have been the result if only Kusama had done the dot-ting. (Besides, she's been there, done that).