Electricity has always been with us. It was here before humans, and will continue to be here long after we’re gone. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and can be our best friend or a dreadful enemy. The idea of using electricity has been around for over 2,000 years. In 600 B.C., Thales of Miletus wrote about pieces of amber becoming charged if they were rubbed against something.What we now know to be simply static electricity was something of a marvel at the time. From that time, we’ve grown leaps and bounds, and now have the knowledge to use electricity to our best advantage, as we see with automobiles. But it didn’t happen overnight. The path to the future is paved with great milestones.

Until 1600, no one had a word for what Thales had discovered. Then, an English scientist named William Gilbert finally coined the term “electricity” after the Greek word for amber. He wrote about the electrical properties of many substances in his De Magnete, Magneticisique Corporibus. (more…)

Batteries are a paradox to those of us who don’t completely understand the way they work. They’re both simple and complex, capturing energy in a small device to power-up our devices. A battery is two or more electrochemical cells which store chemical energy, thus making it available as electrical energy.

Some more common and advanced batteries use only one cell to operate.Some of the more common cell types include galvanic cells, fuel cells, flow cells, electrolytic cells, and voltaic piles. Though archeologists have unearthed batteries from ancient times, Alessandro Volta is credited with creating the first modern battery in 1800.

Since then, batteries of all shapes and sizes have been used. Today’s batteries can be small, powerful, rechargeable, and long-lasting. Using batteries has proven to be an effective way to cut back on energy costs and pollution, and are all-around more convenient than using an electrical outlet.

(more…)

To help protect our planet from things unnecessary like excessive waste which has proven to be dangerous for humans and other species of animals and plants, scientists decided that there were better ways to dispose of waste; the most common and effective way being to recycle and reuse plastic products.Plastic recycling is the process of recovering scrap and waste plastics and reprocessing them into useful products. Sometimes the products are completely different, like plastic bottles into park benches. For those of us who do recycle, we’re sometimes put off by the different numbers used in the process. These numbers are the Plastic Identification Code (PIC).

Seven groups of plastic polymers, each of which have specific properties, are used for packaging applications. Each group of polymer can be indentified by the PIC. The PIC appears inside a three-chasing arrow recycling symbol. This symbol indicates whether the plastic can be recycled into new products.

(more…)

Every year, an estimated 500-billion plastic bags are used worldwide. That’s an absolutely staggering number. When you take into consideration that just one bag has the potential to damage the environment, the other 499 billion are just overwhelming.

There are around 6-billion people on are planet. So to do the math, each man, woman and child uses around 83 plastic bags per year. Of the 500-billion, 1/5 are used in the United States alone.Plastic bags are difficult and very costly to recycle. For that reason, many end up in landfills where they take more than 300 years on average to photo-degrade.

The bags break down into tiny toxic particles that can easily contaminate the soil and waterways. Once an animal ingests these dangerous toxins, they’re forever integrated into the food chain, damaging animals of all sorts and even eliminating some species before they rise to dominance. These toxins are also very dangerous to humans when ingested in large amounts. All it would take is a few glasses of water per day for a few months for an individual to experience health problems from the poison.

(more…)