A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

Discarded plastic bottles abound. Simple and effective methods to recycle, repurpose or reuse the omnipresent debris do not. Chemists at Northwestern University, partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, have demonstrated that a new material referred to as a metal-organic framework -- or MOF -- can function as a stable and selective catalyst for breaking down polyester-based plastic into terephthalic acid, a chemical used in manufacturing. The method requires nothing more than the plastic debris, hydrogen and the MOF catalyst.

"We can do a lot better than starting from scratch when making plastic bottles," said Omar Farha, corresponding author of the study. "Our process is much cleaner."

1."Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference."
– Neil deGrasse Tyson

2. "Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination."
– Jonah Lehrer

3. "Above all, don't fear difficult moments. The best comes from them."
– Rita Levi-Montalcini

The weirdness exhibited by black holes boggles the mind. Formed when a star burns all its nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravitation, black holes are such oddities that at one time, even Einstein didn't think they were possible.

They are regions in space with such intense gravitation that not even light escapes their pull. Once magnificent shining stars burn out and shrink to a relatively tiny husk, all their mass is concentrated in a small space. Imagine our Sun with its diameter of roughly 1.4 million kilometres shrinking to a black hole the size of a small city just six kilometres across. This compactness gives black holes immense gravitational pull.

Paradigm Shift

If we dive into the chronicles of History of Science, we can easily notice that each Scientific Revolution came after a substantial crisis in the established traditions. Major cultural shifts like the transitions from mythological to philosophical mind, from Judaism to Christianity, from Newtonian to Quantum Physics were always part of bigger social changes that gradually induced a switch in people's worldviews. The inhumane exploitation of laborers instigated the need for the formation of the Human Rights Codex but also new and more efficient technologies and devices. The latter brought about the necessity of improved power sources, which now led us to the fearsome levels of Global Pollution and Warming – the biggest environmental catastrophe since the beginning of Written History. Nowadays, we undergo a global shift in the way we treat and see Nature and other species as part of it. The time has come for a Green Revolution – the new paradigm.

We presume generally presume that all questions have their answers. If you can't find an answer, well, you should try harder and really dive into the topic you are searching in. At least, that is the popular belief spread among the academies and universities around the world. Otherwise, why should we even try to pose questions? Nevertheless, there are tons of questions that no one can answer and we face them every day. However, there is another way to look at this paradoxical situation. Maybe it is not necessary that each question has only one right answer.