The Most Littered Object You’ve Never Really Thought About Around 4.5 trillion cigarette butts enter the environment every year, making them the single most-littered item on Earth, ahead of plastic bags, food wrappers, and bottles. Pick one up off the sidewalk and you’re holding a short tube of cellulose acetate, a plastic, not the cotton … Read more
Not Ink. Not Magic. Metal. Most people assume an Etch-A-Sketch works with pigment or dye. It doesn’t. The screen is coated on its inner surface with extremely fine aluminum powder, mixed with small polystyrene beads that help the powder flow and settle. When you twist the knobs, a stylus moves across the back of the … Read more
A Water Bottle, Some Old Clothes, and a Speed Problem Crosby-on-Eden is actually two small villages, High Crosby and Low Crosby, sharing one name and sitting beside the River Eden northeast of Carlisle in Cumbria. The road running through it carries enough through-traffic to be a problem, and local residents, tired of watching cars move … Read more
A Hull Built from the Recycling Bin On March 20, 2010, a 60-foot catamaran named Plastiki left Sausalito, California and set a course for Australia. The crossing covered roughly 8,000 nautical miles, and the boat docked at Sydney Harbour on July 26, 2010, about 128 to 130 days later. What made the voyage unusual wasn’t … Read more
The Most Unlikely Game You’ve Never Heard Of Dodgeball has been a gym-class staple for roughly a century. The bow and arrow spent most of human history as a weapon designed to kill people at a distance. In 2011, John Jackson of Waterloo, Indiana looked at both and decided to combine them. The sport he … Read more
The Deal That Looked Like a Sure Thing In 1965, a French civil law notary named André-François Raffray made what looked like a patient, methodical investment. His client, Jeanne Calment, was 90 years old, owned a large apartment in Arles, and wanted to stay in it for the rest of her life. Raffray agreed to … Read more
The Man in the Hat and Nothing Else Robert John Burck has spent decades standing in Midtown Manhattan wearing white briefs, white cowboy boots, and a white cowboy hat, playing guitar and accepting tips. It has worked consistently enough to make him one of the most recognizable figures in New York City. Burck grew up … Read more
What Happens When Fast Food Workers Stop Caring Most food safety violations are invisible: a thermometer skipped, a surface not properly wiped down. The ones that made national news between 2008 and 2013 were different. Employees didn’t just cut corners, they documented themselves doing it, posted the footage publicly, and waited to see what would … Read more
Beyond the Mustard Bottle Picture a hot dog: sausage, bun, mustard, maybe ketchup. Now picture the same concept in Brazil. The sausage is simmered in tomato sauce with onions and seasoning, then topped with shredded Parmesan and crunchy potato sticks. Depending on the region, you might also get corn, peas, mashed potatoes, shredded carrots, a … Read more
Seventy Years, Same Nickel When Coca-Cola first went on sale at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta on May 8, 1886, a glass cost five cents. Walk into a store in 1950 and you’d still pay five cents for a 6.5-ounce (192 ml) bottle. That price held through two world wars, the Great Depression, and decade … Read more