Environment

A ground-up seed pulled 98% of the microplastics out of drinking water

Scientists handed the 'Miracle Tree' one more impossible job.

Microplastics are in the ocean, in the soil, in the rain, and in the glass of water on your desk. The fixes tend to be expensive, chemical, and built for places that already have money for infrastructure. The one researchers just tested runs on a handful of seeds.

In this story by Mark Wales, the tree doing the work is Moringa oleifera, a scrappy tropical species that thrives in drought and has earned the nickname "miracle tree" for the hundreds of conditions its leaves, bark, and roots have been used to treat. Its seeds were never the famous part. Researchers ground them up, mixed them with a salt solution, and extracted positively charged proteins that act like a magnet for junk. In a process called coagulation, impurities clump onto the proteins and sink. More than 98% of the microplastics sank with them.

The study, published in ACS Omega, put the seed extract head to head with alum, the aluminum sulfate water treatment plants have used for generations. The moringa held steady across a wider range of conditions than the industry standard, while requiring less money and energy. For the communities most exposed to plastic pollution and least equipped to filter it out, that math could change everything.

Do you have a GOOD picture to share?

Send us your best images, and we may feature them as the image of the day. Be sure to tell us a bit about your pic.

Previous Results

In yesterday's issue, we shared the Gen Z grads signing up to teach despite every grim statistic about the job.

And we asked which classroom could you actually survive? Over 40% of you would thrive among the little ones in a kinder class.

• Kindergarten, where glitter is a weapon (41.6%)

• Middle school, also known as the Thunderdome (15.7%)

• Senior year, where nobody is listening anyway (9.0%)

• One day as a sub, then I vanish forever (33.7%)

GOOD reader Canary Rose had this to say. “Little kids have an innocent energy that makes me feel alive.”

Parenting | Courtesy of Upworthy

Culture

A linguist has bad news for everyone who thinks English is dying

The receipts go back to the 1400s.

I'm a writer, which you probably guessed, so believe me when I say I used to be a real language snob, the kind with a running list of pet peeves. Then someone showed me that people have been using "literally" to mean nothing of the kind since 1769, when a novelist named Frances Brooke did it on purpose, in print. The word has been misbehaving longer than the United States has existed. Cured me on the spot.

Valerie Fridland, a linguistics professor who studies why we sound the way we do, has heard every version of the complaint. English has already survived Viking invasions, centuries of French-speaking overlords, and a wave of 18th-century grammarians who sold "proper" speech to a middle class desperate to pass for old money. The complaint isn't new. The complaint is a genre. As she puts it, being disliked and being bad are not the same thing.

And some of the pronunciations you defend were the sloppy ones first. "Often" used to carry a t. "Talk" used to carry an l. Yes, they’re still there in the spelling, but people used to pronounce them. As for that disappearing g, 18th-century pronunciation guides rhymed "coughing" with "coffin" and "jerking" with "jerkin," which means "-in" wasn't the lazy version. It was the correct one. Somebody in the 1800s decided otherwise, and we've been apologizing with an apostrophe ever since. Good luck convincing anyone of that at Thanksgiving.

On August 26, 1939, a Brooklyn Dodgers doubleheader against the Cincinnati Reds became the first Major League Baseball game ever televised, beamed out of Ebbets Field by NBC's experimental station W2XBS. The potential audience was roughly 400 television sets, most of them in the New York area, at a time when TV was still enough of a novelty to be a major attraction at the World's Fair.

Announcer Red Barber called it with no monitor and only two cameras, one behind home plate and one near the visitors' dugout. He had to watch for a camera's red light and guess which way it was aimed. His link to the director cut out mid-game, so he improvised. He also handled the first televised in-game commercials himself, slicing bananas into a bowl of Wheaties on camera and pitching Mobil Oil while wearing a gas station attendant's cap.

The teams split the twin bill. After Barber asked NBC for an engraved silver cigarette box to commemorate the occasion, the network sent it to him along with a $35 bill to cover the cost, a wonderfully humble opening act for an industry that would eventually be worth billions. 

Do you have something GOOD to share?

We’re always on the lookout for uplifting, enlightening, and engaging content to share with readers like you. If you have something you think should be featured in the Daily GOOD, let me know!

💬 From the group text…

Do I have mornings where I just don’t want to get out of bed? You otter believe it!

Join the Group Text! Send us your social media gold.