Most of the plastics that we use at the moment are manufactured from oil.  You break up long chains, and you tend to get small gases, things like ethane.  Out of an oil refinery you can cook up crude oil very hot and get some useful gases.  You can then react them together and then stick them together and the little units stick together.  They form long polymers which is what pretty all plastics are made of.

There has been a lot of research recently into other ways of making plastics in case we do run out of oil: using biological foodstuffs mostly and also so you can make plastics which are more biodegradable because we’re making plastics from oil in a way very alien to organic processes.  Organic things can’t break them down very well.  There have been various things including genetically engineering bacteria to produce precursors to making plastics or even whole plastics themselves.  If you mash up a bacteria extracts with plastic you can get a beautiful plastic out. 

These plastics are doing the same job if not slightly better because they aren’t going to persist in the environment and cause huge pollution like normal plastics do.

When things dry out you’re making the water evaporate and this takes quite a lot of energy.  So you’ve got a large amount of energy in a hot dishwasher, it’s going to be 70, 80, 90 degrees in there.  What you need to do is transfer that heat to the water.  The best way of transferring that heat to the water, is if it’s a thin sheet all over the surface is metal which conducts heat very well.  So most of the heat should evaporate the water and it dries out really well.  Things like china conduct heat reasonably well so if you’ve got hot china it’s got quite a lot of heat in it and it can conduct out well and the water should dry out.  It tends to be in fairly small globules.

As he’s saying Teflon® is very, what’s called, hydrophobic so it doesn’t like water.  The water tends to collect in great big globules so you’ve got to get lots of heat into a very small area which is difficult so heat’s being lost through the rest of the pan.  Also, the Teflon® is quite insulating so it’s hard for heat to get through it.  It will tend to actually go out through the metal on the other side and so probably that’s the reason why you’re getting water left in your pans.

That’s a very good question.  Yawning is a really common reflex, actually that happens in lots of different animals.  If you see someone yawning you want to yawn yourself which is very strange.  We see it in all these animals including some that maybe aren’t so social.  Maybe it isn’t something that’s learned but maybe a bit more inherent.  Perhaps it just starts to arrive at some point.

Wild dogs in Africa get contagious yawning, where one will yawn and then the other will yawn and it tends to be about the time when they’re going to bed.  It’s a nice way of getting the whole pack to decide to go to bed.

Often with very young babies, their eyesight isn’t very good.  They can’t focus very well so it could be just she can’t see you yawning.  She doesn’t learn how to yawn from that.