Advice4all

In the wake of the world’s Attenborough-inspired drive against single-use plastic, McDonald’s restaurants in the UK and Ireland decided to ditch their plastic straws in favor of paper straws. There’s just one problem: the new paper straws are not recyclable, while their old plastic straws were.  An internal McDonald’s memo, leaked by an insider to The Sun, shows that members of staff in the UK are advised to put the paper straws into general trash along with food and other nonrecyclables “until further notice.” Although the materials themselves are recyclable, the memo notes they are constructed in a way that means it’s not possible for most process plants to currently recycle them. “While the materials are recyclable, their current thickness …

The World Health Organization advises people to not rely too much on electric fans when temperatures rise above 35°C (95°F) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) strongly advises against them at temperatures over 37°C (99°F). Researchers from the University of Sydney were curious to know if these guidelines had any scientific backing. In a small study involving 12 healthy male volunteers, they found that the advice appears to be too clean-cut and that the actual picture is more nuanced. The team found that in environments that were very hot and humid, fans were more beneficial that in dry and hot environments. The findings are reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The team used a measurement known as the …

Earlier this month, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) issued a statement urging people to “kill green iguanas on their own property whenever possible.” “Green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are an invasive species in Florida and are not native to our state,” they explained in a now-updated website post. “They can cause considerable damage to infrastructure, including seawalls and sidewalks. This species is not protected in Florida except by anti-cruelty law.” The post went on to say that “the FWC encourages homeowners to humanely kill green iguanas on their own property whenever possible. Iguanas can also be killed year-round and without a permit on 22 public lands in south Florida,” Huffington Post reports. Unfortunately, some people appear to have embraced the directive to kill the invasive iguanas a …

Black holes are talked about so often in astronomy that it may come as a surprise to discover that we know only a few dozens of them inhabiting the Milky Way. Apart from the central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, all the others are at most 15 times the mass of the Sun, but statistically, there should be many more. Maybe tens of millions more. Finding all these black holes is currently next to impossible thanks to a very distinctive property: They are black. All the known ones have companions or have been caught gobbling up material that led to emitting light, which can be observed. As reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers do have …