This collection of hundreds of coloured, jagged shards could be a work of abstract art. But the objects in the photograph to the right are the contents of the stomach of a sea turtle that lost its battle with plastic pollution.
Environmentalists examined the stomach of the juvenile turtle found off the coast of Argentina. The bellyful of debris that they found is symptomatic of the increasing threat to the sea turtles from a human addiction to plastic.
The final frontier smells a lot like a Nascar race—a bouquet of hot metal, diesel fumes and barbecue. The source? Dying stars, mostly.
The by-products of all this rampant combustion are smelly compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These molecules “seem to be all over the universe,” says Louis Allamandola, the founder and director of the Astrophysics and Astrochemistry Lab at NASA Ames Research Center. “And they float around forever,” appearing in comets, meteors and space dust. These hydrocarbons have even been shortlisted for the basis of the earliest forms of life on Earth. Not surprisingly, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons can be found in coal, oil and even food.
No sir, civility has to be maintained. That’s why we’re alerting you to this article on the ethic of flying by The Wall Street Journal travel writer Scott McCartney of The Middle Seat. Starting with the ever important question of who gets the armrest:
1. You’re in the middle seat, between two strangers. Who gets the armrests?
Anne Loew, veteran flight attendant: The folks in the aisle seat can lean toward the aisle, and the window-seat passenger has the window to lean on. The poor middle-seat passengers are suffering enough–they get both armrests.
Gordon Bethune, former Continental Airlines chief executive: They do.
James Vesper, frequent traveler: The middle seat gets both arm rests.
Richard Wishner, frequent traveler: You share. The bigger guy gets the forward part of the armrest.
Anna Post, etiquette expert: There is no innate winner of the arm-rest battle. If I’m in the middle seat, I try to claim one. They are not both yours for the duration.
Kirk Hanson, Santa Clara University ethics professor: Fairness requires the allocation of at least one arm rest to each traveler. Therefore, the side seats get the “outbound” armrests away from the middle seat. The middle passenger gets both armrests, in part as compensation for the dreaded middle seat.
Need your slice of awesome today? Then check out this truly astonishing picture of a detached prominence off the limb of the Sun:
What does it take for Johan Fourie to visit his mom? Winning the lottery, apparently:
When Johan Fourie’s mom asked him on Sunday when he was going to come visit her, his answer was as funny as it was seemingly unrealistic.
“When I win the lottery,” Fourie said.
Moments later, Fourie checked his Florida Lotto ticket and saw that he had actually won the $4 million jackpot.
“I had no idea I would be calling her back later that day to tell her I was on my way!” he said Wednesday.
Speaking of GM and electric cars, here’s an ad from 1969 that shows a series hybrid powered by a stirling engine. The underlying concept isn’t actually so different from the upcoming Chevy Volt, and while at the time the technology probably wasn’t there to make this a commercial success, we can wonder what happened to this concept in the years between then and now.
