It’s not that adults crave being grounded in the classical sense, but rather that the idea of being grounded, or having a break from responsibilities, can be appealing. As adults, people often have numerous responsibilities, such as work, family, and social obligations, which can lead to burnout. The concept of being grounded as a punishment in childhood translates to adults yearning for a pause or a break from these responsibilities.

In this sense, adults might romanticize being grounded because it represents a chance to slow down, relax, and recharge without the burden of adult responsibilities. It’s not about the actual act of being grounded but about having the freedom to do nothing and have someone else take care of things for a change.

This sentiment is often humorously expressed in memes and jokes about adulthood, where people poke fun at how their priorities and desires change as they grow older.

As The Guardian reported earlier this year, scientists have started warned that some of these studies may be based on errors due bad methodology, inadequate efforts to limit plastic contamination, and lack of validation.

“We finally traced it down to gloves.”

Now, researchers from the University of Michigan have found that the special coating on commonly used nitrile and latex gloves worn by scientists could be causing measured levels of microplastics to shoot through the roof, even though the coating isn’t technically made of microplastics itself.

In short, it could take quite some time until we know for sure just how pervasive the small pieces of plastic are in the environment, let alone their effects on our health.

https://futurism.com/science-energy/microplastics-samples-gloves

Maanantaita on helppo vihata, mutta harva tietää, että sillä voi olla myös mitattavia vaikutuksia terveyteen ja turvallisuuteen.

An MRI scan is never a pleasant occasion – even if you aren’t worried about the outcome, lying still in a confined, noisy space for long periods of time is at best an irksome experience. For hearing protection and to ameliorate boredom or claustrophobia, the patient wears headphones. Since magnets and wires can’t be used inside an MRI machine, the headphones have to literally pipe the sound in through tubes, which gives them poor sound quality and reduces the amount of noise they can block. [SomethingAboutScience], however, thinks that photoacoustic speakers could improve on these, and built some to demonstrate.

These speakers use the photoacoustic effect, which is mostly caused by surface heating when exposed to an intense light, then transferring the heat to the surrounding air, which expands. If the surface can transfer heat to the air quickly enough, and if the light source is modulated quickly, the rapid expansions and contractions in the surrounding air create sound waves. As a test, [SomethingAboutScience] shone a modulated 5-Watt laser on a piece of gold leaf, which produced recognizable music.

Gold leaf works because it absorbs blue light well and is thin enough to transfer heat to the air quickly. To cut out the absorbing surface, [SomethingAboutScience] also shone the laser directly into orange nitrogen dioxide gas, which produced a somewhat cleaner sound (in a purely auditory sense; nitrogen dioxide is quite dangerous, and calling it “a little toxic” is an understatement).