The World In Brief
All over the world there are crazy things afoot. Things that'll make you either cry with laughter or shake your head in despair. Here's a selection from the last few days:
- The British government has turned down a grant application to use national lottery funding to build a replica of the Starship Enterprise. The designer claimed that the land based space craft would be used as a place for 'lonely people' to meet. Sounds more like an idea from the galactically insane to me.
- More than 100,000 tons of plastic milk bottles are dumped in UK landfill sites each year. Well finally a British inventor has come up with a solution to this environmental problem having produced a biodegradable container for our favourite cow juice. And the name of this vessel - Greenbottle - of course.
- In South Africa, environment officials have uncovered an attempt to smuggle some of the world's most poisoness snakes. A potential tragedy was prevented when this deadly cargo was discovered hidden in some video cassettes. Now what would you rather do - open a video cassette and find that it contained live snakes or open a cassette and be forced to watch the Hollywood blockbuster 'Snakes on a plane'? It's a tough call.
- An American survey of ladder related injuries over the last 15 years claims that each year, over 135,000 people injure themselves whilst using ladders. A whopping 77% of those injured were men and the most common injury was to the feet. It seems clear that steps need to be taken to prevent these accidents from escalating further.
Go to Dr Duck's World in Brief page for crazy science snippets from weeks gone by.
Picture courtesy of Stacy Braswell
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