Today, women, and men, have a potential arsenal of technologies to deploy in an attempt to soften the effects of the incessant March of Time. Botox, hair dye, pills, fancy face creams… How do some of these work? Do they work? Are they safe?

I’ve got something to get off my chest… This goes back to my playground days; it started with those boys teasing me, saying that they’d heard I’d found condoms in the sandbox.

Of course I denied this vehemently, and when they left me alone (my third grade reputation intact, for the time being) I went to go figure out what these “condoms” were.Rumors were that they were white, soft and round, and by the way the boys were taunting, items you didn’t want to be touching…

Now I was worried. Because I had uncovered white colored, soft cylindrical things while sifting through the sand. So, I asked Mom.

Turns out what I had been digging up were not condoms, but cigarette filters, remains of the litter of loitering teens.

Phew, now that that’s out of the way, this brings me to: litter.

Trash, waste, rubbish, jetsam, junk.

Americans throw away 220 million tons of garbage each year. That amount would bury more than 82,000 football fields six feet deep in compacted garbage. (Mmmm, nothing like the smell of compacted garbage in the morning.)  That’s over 4 pounds per person per day. This stuff gets collected from roads, cans, sidewalks and goes to landfills to be buried underground or is dumped out at sea.

So much of our stuff is disposable, and so much disposable stuff doesn’t break down very easily. Most plastics and the Styrofoam things we toss are made with petroleum-derived stuff and withstand rain, wind, sun and especially microbes like bacteria and fungus that normally breakdown  “biodegradable” items like paper, wood and food.

The infamous cigarette butts, for example, are made of cellulose acetate, a type of plastic, and can hang around for more than 5 years after they’re flicked to the sidewalk. The Styrofoam box that kept your kung pao chicken warm for 10 minutes will still be chillin in a dump 500 years from now.

So I’m not going get all rabid about “reducing, reusing, recycling” here, but I will mention something gross and amazing that owes it’s existence to all this trash.

You might have heard about it, but there is a place in the Pacific Ocean where currents come together to make a huge slow vortex, called the Great Pacific Gyre.

Because oceans are so big (water covering 70% of the surface of our Earth!) it took a while for people to find out that this gyre has been collecting trash; pulling in junk- mostly plastic bags, bits of plastic debris.

Not just some trash, but a whole lot of it; this trash pool, called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is now more than twice the size of Texas, and growing. This enormous island of plastic crap is slowly degrading, and affecting marine life.

Scientists are looking to see what exactly is the fallout from so much accumulated floating waste, and looking into whether this stuff can be scooped up and maybe recycled, or turned into fuel, perhaps funding its own clean-up.

I’m not really sure where my garbage goes when I chuck it. Some wonks at MIT have figured a way to track trash with cell-phone like tags. I’ve had these gyres on my mind when I grab another plastic fork for just one meal…

(P.S. For another take on the Great Garbage Patch(es), see “Sea Trash” by Nina Shen Rastogi from Slate’s Green Lantern!)

Yerp, it’s sidewalk ice. And if you live in a place where you’re lucky enough to experience below freezing temperatures, you’ve probably had a run-in with the slippery stuff at some point.

But when things get slick enough, people bust out the bags of blue and white salt, and trucks dump the pellets on the roads, like rusty, smoggy winter fairies.

But why all this cement seasoning? What’s the point? Besides giving us extra-crispy pant hems…

The story starts with water, and ends in a broken wrist avoided.

Water is made up of building blocks called molecules. Each building block is made up of 3 main parts, or atoms- 1 Hydrogen and 2 Oxygens. (That’s where “H2O” comes from). These molecules are shaped a bit like Mikey Mouse’s head, and like to stick to each other with temporary bonds between hydrogens and oxygens. These “hydrogen bonds” are actually what makes water so tough to boil and evaporate; all the water parts are hanging on to each other. When temperatures drop, the mickeys in liquid water start to slow down, and the bonds between them become more ordered. Under 32°F, most water ice in the world has ordered itself into a crystal, a molecules bound in a pattern.

What happens when other characters get in the mix?

“Salt” can mean the salt we shake all over our movie popcorn after extra pumps of buttery goodness, or many other substances made up of both negatively and positively charged molecules. When these positive and negative molecules dissolve in water, they interrupt water’s hydrogen bonding to itself.

So when the the temp drops, water can’t crystallize into ice as readily. Thanks to the salt, the water will stay liquid longer; this is the same reason oceans can stay sloshy even when fresh water is frozen.

But are they as bad as our moms made them out to be? Are they couriers of disease?

Pigeons, also known as Rock Doves, came to North America with settlers of Nova Scotia (that’s in Canada) in the early 1600s. Escaped Rock Pigeons eventually established the feral flocks we see in cities today, probably helped out by some escaped homing pigeons and racing pigeons too.

Surprisingly, pigeons can be speedy and smart, and have been used by people to communicate for thousands of years, including during the ancient Olympic games. In the late 1800s a pigeon carrying messages in New Zealand averaged 77 mph, and champion racing pigeons can travel over 500 miles in a day!  Pigeons played a vital role in World War I and even during WWII to get messages across enemy lines and to send out distress messages of sinking ships.  It’s crazy, but a “pigeon post” was still in use in India until 2004!

So, it might be hard to believe that the waddling flocks pecking at trash on the sidewalk could be the same heroic birds that delivered the first ‘texts’ thousands of years ago. But, the pigeons we see today have a surprising amount of intelligence; they can see color, much like we do, and also see ultra-violet light. They may use highways and other landmarks to help navigate, and they also are among an elite group of animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror.

Ok; so the birds are smart and were once upon a time useful…so what? Well, pigeons are still considered ‘useful’ to many chefs around the world. Yes, people (including Emeril and Bobby Flay) eat pigeon, or ‘squab’, and it’s considered a delicacy. Mmmmm…

We get to the original question of whether pigeons deserve their bad rap as dirty birds.

Pigeons are the feathered street-sweepers of the city, but what goes in must come out. The biggest problem with urban pigeon flocks is the mass of mess they leave behind. This wasn’t always the case though. For hundred of years in Europe, pigeon poop was prized as an excellent fertilizer, and in the 1500s it was the major source of an important ingredient in gunpowder. Armed guards were even stationed at pigeon coops to prevent theft of the white stuff!

But until the market for pigeon fertilizer picks up again, we have to contend with the droppings in our cities. It’s true that the droppings can harbor diseases, but the birds themselves remain pretty clean, taking baths and preening their feathers. Even so, one study identified 60 different microorganisms associated with city pigeons that can cause human disease. However, only 10 of these have ever been documented to have been passed to people, and then, mostly to people with weakened immune systems, or those who hang with the birds a lot. Even when pet pigeons slum it with feral flocks, they stay healthy.

The New York City Department of Health, and other major metropolis offices, have no documented cases of people catching diseases from pigeons. There has been only one reported case of someone dying from exposure to dried pigeon poop, and this Dutch woman was highly allergic to the stuff.
It has been stated that salmonella, one of the diseases associated with pigeons, is far more likely to be contracted by human beings through eating supermarket eggs or chicken than through contact with wild birds. In addition, pigeons don’t carry avian influenza “bird flu”, and they can’t carry and transmit West Nile Virus.  Overall, rodents and flies have higher rates of disease transmission to humans than pigeons do!

Should you run out and lather yourself with pigeon poo? Ah, no. But should you wrinkle your nose with disgust and shudder every time you pass these birds on the street? They probably don’t deserve it. In fact, they pigeons probably deserve a little more respect, considering their noble history and surprising smarts. If you do hug a pigeon, remember to wash your hands.
21 Amazing Pigeon Facts!

Cornell PigeonWatch

HSUS Closer Look

TechLetter

We can actually blame microscopic bacteria. These single-cell critters live all over (and all through) our body, and the ones on our feet munch on our skin oils, dead skin and like to multiply in sweat. Since feet in shoes don’t air out very well, and it’s nice and dark in there, the bacteria have an intimate buffet, and make waste products that stink (and who doesn’t…?).

Some people (10-15%) have really stinky feet and sneaks; they have the luck of hosting a specific kind of bacteria called Kytococcus sedentarius; these “bugs” not only give off the stinky organic chemicals like the other bacteria types, but also some rotten-egg smelling stuff called “volatile sulfur” compounds.

When your kicks get wet, like from sloshing through rain puddles, the water mixes up a soup of bacteria “food” (your foot leftovers) and also sets the stinky waste compounds free to float to your nose again: a double-whammy of stench.

Basically, the lights are glass tubes filled with gas and sometimes a heavy metal, like mercury. When you flip the switch, an electric current is run through the tube, one end to the other. The electricity causes free electrons to bash into the atoms of gas and metal in the tube. This causes the gas and metal’s surrounding electrons to “jump” into a higher energy state, like Mario and his toadstools. When the electron falls back to its original state, it emits a little piece of light; a photon.

The gases used are in a related family of nonreactive, or inert,  gases. Remember (vaguely?) the periodic table of the elements from back in the day? These inert gases are also called the Noble gases and are found in the farthest right-hand column of the table. Each element has its own atomic structure (number of electrons etc.). The structure determines the energy of the emitted photon and the energy determines what color of light gets emitted. So by mixing different gases and metals, neon sign makers can broadcast your fave beer in a rainbow of colors.