1) Solar panels (like most “waste”) should be recycled.
In 2025, Australia generated 60,000 tonnes of solar panel waste. The metallic parts of a solar panel are aluminium, and are very easily recycled. The rest (the blue parts) are 95% glass and about 5% solar cell. The glass can be easily recycled. Silver is used as a paste on the front and the back of the solar cells as a conductor. The silver used on solar cells makes up 30% of current silver consumption. An old technology (froth flotation) can easily recover 98% of this silver.
Solar panel waste (60,000 tonnes per year in Oz) makes up one fifth of 1% of the annual solid waste stream in Oz – 27 million tonnes of building and demolition waste, 15 million tonnes of organic waste and 10 million tonnes of coal ash.
Australia burns roughly 100–120 million tonnes of coal each year to generate electricity. On average, coal has 1.3 parts per million of radioactive uranium and 3.2 parts per million of radioactive thorium. That works out to 143 tonnes of radioactive uranium and 385 tonnes of radioactive thorium dumped “somewhere” in Australia – each year!
Dogs evolved from wolves some 15,000 years ago. They are so “tuned” to humans that they respond positively to a random human smiling, and respond negatively to a random human frowning. This was shown by getting a very good doggie to sit very still inside a very noisy MRI scanner, and then being shown pictures of human faces.
Images of smiling human faces consistently lit up the temporal cortex and caudate nucleus, which are regions of the brain associated with reward and other functions like learning and emotion. In a second experiment, the researchers showed dogs pictures of people displaying happiness, fear, anger, and sadness.
Analysis of the animals’ brain activity revealed distinct patterns separating fear from anger and sadness, suggesting that dogs can tell the difference between certain negative facial expressions.
3) Tickle Monster Haunts Whole World
From Aristotle to Darwin to present-day luminaries, the world’s brightest, most inquisitive minds have grappled with one of the world’s greatest mysteries: Why are we ticklish? While different eras gave rise to different hypotheses, a lack of data on tickling had hindered attempts to find the truth. Now, a new study helps to fill in the gaps.
To test theories about ticklishness, researchers opted against the ethically dubious approach of clinically tickling a statistically significant number of people. Instead, they sent a survey to 448 participants of Dutch, Chinese, and people of Greek descent asking a plethora of questions about gargalesis, as playful and intentional tickling is scientifically (and less charmingly) known. Respondents, all of whom ranged from 18 to 30 years old, described when they had been tickled, where on their bodies they were most ticklish, and how they felt about the activity.
The researchers found that about 95% of respondents, regardless of their backgrounds, had been tickled. What’s more, people from across the world consistently identified the neck, armpits, abdomen, and soles of the feet as the most ticklish parts of their bodies. These regions differed from the areas where respondents felt the most pleasure or pain.
Taken together, the results suggest that ticklishness is a culturally shared sensation that arises from a combination of physical, neural, and psychosocial pathways distinct from other sensory phenomena. While the findings lend support to Darwin’s theory that we are most ticklish in the areas where we are least frequently touched, “ no single theory can fully explain why some parts of the body are more ticklish than others,” study co-author Ziliang Xiong said in a statement. His lab is developing a robotic tickling device for use in future studies.
