YOUNG SCIENTISTS: Better than plywood

Two teens made a strong, waterproof building material out of things that are normally thrown away.

Nurul Roslan (left) and Hanis Zaini (right), both 17, invented a new material from a blend of recycled plastic and pineapple leaf fibers. It’s waterproof and stronger than plywood, according to tests by these teens from Melaka, Malaysia.

 

LOS ANGELES — A new material made from plant leaves could be replace plywood for many uses. The material is strong, waterproof, cheap and easy to make. Two teens invented it using a blend of pineapple waste and recycled plastics.
Those raw ingredients are abundant in Malaysia, where the girls live. The largest part of the new material is a type of plastic called high-density polyethylene. It is used to make many things, including milk jugs and shampoo bottles. Known as HDPE, this plastic is often recycled or thrown away, says Nurul Roslan, 17. She attends Mara Junior Science College Terendak in Melaka, Malaysia. But when treated like trash, the plastic doesn’t degrade quickly. Studies show that this plastic can take about 450 years to break down, she says.

The other ingredient in the new material is fiber from pineapple leaves. These leaves are tough because they contain a strong material called lignin. It doesn’t decompose quickly. Farmers often burn the leaves to dispose of them. That causes air pollution, says Nurul’s classmate Hanis Zaini, who is also 17. If farmers don’t burn the leaves, they send them to a landfill. There they join the discarded plastic.

How To Waste Time Properly

The right distractions can boost creativity.

Ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor timed the exact number of seconds that Bethlehem Steel workers took to push shovels into a load of iron ore and then draw them out, maximizing time efficiency has been a holy grail of the American workplace. But psychologists and neuroscientists are showing us the limits of this attitude: Wasting time, they say, can make you more creative. Even seemingly meaningless activities such as watching cat videos on YouTube may help you solve math problems.

Brent Coker, who studies online behavior at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found that people who engage in “workplace Internet leisure browsing” are about 9 percent more productive than those who don’t. Last year, Jonathan Schooler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara published with his doctoral student Benjamin Baird a study called Inspired by Distraction. It concluded that “engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving.”
Schooler gave participants a series of “unusual uses tasks” (UUTs), which asked them to invent as many different uses as they could for a mundane object. The more original the responses, the more creativity they were demonstrating. After performing a baseline test, participants were divided into groups and given different 12-minute “incubation” periods. These consisted of either a demanding memory task, an undemanding memory task that allowed for mind-wandering, or total rest. A fourth group had no incubation interval at all. Then all four groups were presented with more UUTs, which involved at least one object from the first round. The group that had been given a non-demanding incubation task showed the most-improved UUT scores.


People who engage in “workplace Internet leisure browsing” are about 9 percent more productive than those who don’t.

“The most surprising result of the study was that the non-demanding task was actually better than doing nothing,” Schooler says. Why this is so, however, is less clear. “My best guess is that if you’re engaged in a non-demanding task, it kind of prevents you from having long trains of thought,” Schooler posits. “It’s sort of churning things up, stirring the pot, so you’re not maintaining one thought for a particularly long time. There are a lot of different ideas going in and out, and that sort of associative process leads to creative incubation.”

Saving vanishing ‘tongues’

Many languages disappear every year. In a race against time, language researchers are using digital technology to preserve those tongues from extinction.

 

Ong uyan madongo?

You probably don’t know how to answer that question — unless you happen to be one of the roughly 430 people in the world who speak a language called Matukar Panau. Then you would know it means, “How are you?”

Matukar Panau is one of the world’s rarest languages. It is spoken in just two small coastal villages in Papua New Guinea. This tropical island nation lies in the southwest Pacific Ocean.
Until five years ago, David Harrison, a language expert at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania didn’t know much about Matukar Panau either. No one had ever recorded or even studied its words and rules. With so few speakers, the language risked vanishing without a blip. It was endangered.

An animal is endangered when its population becomes so rare that it faces a serious risk of going extinct. An endangered language has so few speakers that its words soon may never be spoken or heard again. Harrison didn’t want that to happen to Matukar Panau. So in 2009, he set out for Papua New Guinea. His goal: use modern technology to help the remaining speakers preserve their native tongue.

The sorrow and defiance of Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

So begins one of Maya Angelou’s poems, written in 1978. One of her most famous, it unsurprisingly features in many of the obituaries and pieces that commemorate her life. It is used to demonstrate her individuality, her political voice, her strength.

The poem catches the tone, the pace and rhythm of all her writing, whatever its genre. There is the gritty, determined and defiant attitude, the sometimes literal refusal to take anything lying down. There is the simple energy and downright forthrightness of expression. There is the direct address. Sometimes that direct address is to the reader, establishing an almost unbelievable intimacy between the speaker and the spoken to, the “I” and the “you”; at other times it is to all those who would deny the humanity of Angelou – as an African American, as a woman, as one of those denied opportunity, choice and power.

Above all, there is the link with the whole tradition of African American music – spirituals, blues, gospels, jazz, rap – that uses insistent rhythms, hypnotic repetition, lines that swing, sway and curve their way into the mind and soul to make a point, to play on an idea, to strike an attitude and, more simply, to assert a belief and a presence, a being in the world.

Good vibrations bring braille into the 21st century

Even in a world of digital devices, braille continues to be a vital part of life for blind people. For nearly 200 years, this versatile writing system has allowed them to learn, work and live in a more independent way.

Technology undoubtedly has a role to play in enabling blind people to live independent lives. The news that the world’s first braille mobile phone has gone on sale is a step in the right direction but it is also clear that more people need to learn braille in the first place.

A 1998 study of 74 blind adults found that among those who had not learnt braille, 77% were unemployed while the figure dropped to only 44% among braille readers.

Despite this, a report by the National Federation of the Blind in 2009 revealed that fewer than 10% of legally blind people in the US are braille readers.

We are looking at how learners can make use of the touchscreen and keyboard devices that have become part of most people’s daily lives to learn braille, which, in turn, could help them gain better access to work and education.

For Black Kids in America, a Degree Is No Guarantee

A new study shows that African-American college graduates face unemployment rates nearly twice as high as others with the same education. 

 

The Ivy-League-educated barista who can't find a job that pays enough to live anywhere besides her childhood bedroom. The freshly minted MBA and law-school graduates strapped with debt and frustrated about the six-figure jobs and master-of-the-universe titles that haven't materialized.

Nearly five years after the Great Recession officially ended, the struggles and dampened expectations of young college graduates have become a fixture of American politics and even popular culture. But amid all the focus on the difficulties of college-educated millennials, one facet of this upheaval has remained largely unexplored: the continued significance of race.

As a new crop of college graduates joins the American workforce, unemployment rates among minorities with degrees remain distinctly elevated and their economic prospects disproportionately dimmed, a new report released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research has found.

In 2013, the most recent period for which unemployment data are available by both race and educational attainment, 12.4 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate stood at just 5.6 percent. The figures point to an ugly truth: Black college graduates are more than twice as likely to be unemployed.

"We absolutely aren't trying to discourage people from going to college," said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research who coauthored the study. "College degrees do have value. But what we are trying to show here is that this is not about individuals, or individual effort. There is simply overwhelming evidence that discrimination remains a major feature of the labor market."

Educational waste: what’s missing in Australian classrooms

Have you ever walked out of a class without having learned anything at all? Or maybe you were on the other end, watching your intricately planned lesson go off the rails because students didn’t prepare for class?

If so, you might have experienced “educational waste”, and it’s something we need to talk about.

We define educational waste as the time and resources that are wasted and could be used more effectively while trying to educate. It’s morally wrong and inexcusably common.

Learning inefficiencies

Students, of course, experience educational waste. A lecture or a day of school might be described by a student as “a waste of time”. Class might have been filled with superfluous (but interesting) facts or extraneous quantitative details, that didn’t fully engage students.

A misalignment of teaching and assessment makes any learning that happened feel unproductive; students ask “is this going to be in the test?” and the answer is maybe. Travelling to school for such a wasteful class and purchasing textbooks that aren’t used creates financial (and environmental) waste. Worse still are dreams unfulfilled and promises broken by the education industry, resulting in wasted emotional investment.

Tut's Tomb: A Replica Fit for a King

How high-tech copies of ancient archaeological sites can help preserve them.

 

The thing to understand about archaeology is that it's a science of destruction. The moment an ancient site is discovered, its physical condition immediately begins to deteriorate. Every dig removes a layer of the archaeological record that can never be replaced, and once humans are allowed to visit, with their hot breath and sweat and backpacks, walls start crumbling, pigments start flaking, and before you know it the site has to close down to "rest," or close for good—a victim of its own celebrity.
Now, a practice is gaining traction that may save us from inadvertently wrecking the very cultural treasures we most want to see: the creation of high-tech copies of ancient archaeological sites. We're not talking sized-down Las Vegas knockoffs of the Pyramids but forensically analyzed, 3-D copies so minutely detailed that the naked eye can't distinguish them from the originals.

Recently in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, the most ambitious large-scale creation of this kind was unveiled: an exact replica of the 3,245-year-old tomb of King Tutankhamun, apparently so authentic that one Egyptologist in attendance (Salima Ikram from The American University in Cairo) actually wept when she saw the burial chamber.

"She had a very emotional reaction, even knowing she was in a copy—that was a great moment for me," said Adam Lowe, the British artist whose Madrid-based company, Factum Arte, made the replica as a philanthropic project; he donated his team's time and raised money to cover other costs. The $690,000 project took five years, beginning in 2009, when the team used state-of-the-art laser scanning and digitizing equipment to minutely "record" every aspect of the tomb.

Hundreds of Nigerian teachers strike over kidnapped schoolgirls

Nigerian teachers stage nationwide rallies over Boko Haram's deadly terror campaign against children and colleagues.

Nigerian teachers have held a strike and staged rallies nationwide to protest against the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls by Boko Haram and the killing of nearly as many teachers during its insurgency.

Gunmen from the Islamist group stormed a school outside the remote north-eastern town of Chibok on 14 April, carting away some 270 girls in trucks. More than 50 have escaped but at least 200 remain in captivity, as do scores of girls kidnapped previously.

The president of the National Union of Teachers, Michael Alogba-Olukoya, told reporters Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates as "western education is sinful", had killed 173 teachers in the past five years. "All schools nationwide shall be closed as the day will be our day of protest against the abduction of the Chibok female students and the heartless murder of the 173 teachers," he said.

In Maiduguri, capital of the north-eastern state of Borno, where the insurgency is most intense, some 40 teachers marched to the office of Governor Kashim Shettima. The demonstrators chanted: "Bring back our girls" and waved placards reading: "Vulnerable schools should be fenced".

Shettima went to the gates of the compound to speak to the teachers, who wore black union vests over their traditional robes and were escorted by the army.

Green your garden, help the environment and lower your bills

The Chelsea Flower Show is in full bloom. The UK’s annual botanical extravaganza celebrates all aspects of horticulture and is an important venue for watching emerging trends in the gardening world. But how can we maximise the green spaces we have to hand and also benefit the environment?

In the UK, domestic gardens represent 20-25% of a city’s area and the vast majority of urban residents have access to one. What we grow in these green spaces and –- importantly – how they are managed, could have a significant environmental impact within our cities.

Plant services

There are a number of ways that plants and gardens provide positive and negative “services”. For example, scientists are confident that plants provide localised cooling, decrease the risk of flooding and support biodiversity. They are also confident about the risks and the extent of potential damage from using peat, chemicals and fertilisers in plant management. It is therefore critical that we use this knowledge to maximise the positive impact of our green spaces.

Much as different management practices have a smaller or greater environmental impact, plants themselves can differ a huge amount in the different benefits (and costs) that they entail and provide.

 
In a recent study focusing on the cooling service provided by green roofs, our Royal Horticultural Society science team found that broad-leaved plants cooled their own and surrounding surfaces better than the traditionally used succulent plants. This is because the broad and thin-leaved plants use and lose more water than thicker-leaved succulents, cooling better through the process of transpiration. In our outdoor experiments, on a hot sunny summer day this led to broad-leaved Stachys byzantina (Lamb’s Ear) cooling the soil (and so potentially a roof surface if planted there) by a huge 12°C more than a covering of succulent Sedum.