Kickstart: Good news for germaphobes

Single-use disposable products owe a lot to germaphobes – and, really, to anyone who has a healthy fear of germs, too.

Paper disposable cups became popular more than 100 years ago when health experts saw that common, shared cups or dippers on trains were spreading serious diseases like tuberculosis and diptheria.

The folks at Novolex just introduced a new product that can help us all avoid using plastic utensils that have been touched by others. The Cutlerease fork, knife and spoon are compostable, and come in a dispenser that offers them one at a time.

Because if you’re going to use a spork, you definitely want it to be compostable, and not come wrapped in a little plastic bag.

Helga and Zohar are going to space in 2020. But they aren’t astronauts. They’re “phantom women” made of plastic that simulates the human body, and they’re being used to test the effects of radiation on space explorers.

Both Helga and Zohar are made up of 38 slices of tissue-equivalent plastics, like the dummies used in hospitals to find the right dose of radiation for cancer therapies.

“We chose female phantoms because the number of women astronauts is increasing, and also because the female body is typically more vulnerable to radiation,” said Thomas Berger, lead scientist of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE) at the German Aerospace Center, DLR.

Since this is an experiment, there is one major difference between the two plastic astronauts. Zohar gets to wear a radiation protection vest, while Helga will be unprotected.

Sounds like Helga drew the short straw.

Our Dec. 2 print edition, and our website this week, have been filled with stories about the outlook for plastics machinery in 2020, including blow molding equipment and injection presses.

Bill Bregar and Audrey LaForest interviewed more than 40 machinery executive for the stories.

Here’s your chance to get more insight from their reporting work: at 2 p.m. ET today, we’ll discuss the outlook for the machinery sector in 2020 in our PN Live event. Sign up now, and you can even submit questions.