Kickstart: Time for a Ph.D. dance-off

Defending your Ph.D. is both hard and nerve-wracking (at least from what I've heard from actual Ph.D. holders). But can you dance to it?

Dance Your Ph.D. is a contest put on by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the magazine Science that "challenges scientists around the world to explain their research through the most jargon-free medium available: interpretive dance," Science writes.

I've met many brilliant people who have problems explaining their work to laymen, so I've always loved the concept behind Dance Your Ph.D. After all, it's hard to get people to agree to support your ideas if they don't understand them.

If you're the overall prize winner from the University of Helsinki, for example, you can title your paper "Formation, structure and stability of atmospheric molecular clusters" and get it published, but rapping and dancing about how you "filter out the crap" to better understand atmospheric changes leading to dangerous weather through computer simulations makes it a little easier to explain.

Or if you're Fanon Julienne, the winner of the biology category, you use belly dancers to illustrate how sun and water affect the breakdown of plastics, or: "Fragmentation of plastics: effect of the environment and the nature of the polymer on the size and the shape of generated fragments."

You can find a list of all the winners and their video submissions here.

You've probably run across a lot of "a year ago everything changed" stories this past week as the U.S. marks the one-year point since COVID-19 restrictions hit most Americans.

For resin makers, that means recognition for how their companies worked overtime to shift to unexpected changes in demand.

"Demand for some products faltered, but people also needed our products for masks and other supplies to keep people safe," ExxonMobil Chemical President Karen McKee said during the online World Petrochemical Conference hosted by IHS Markit.

As Frank Esposito writes, CEOs of top resin makers all cited the complications in seeing demand from one market fall while new markets opened up.

That meant shifting into production for material used in face masks and hand sanitizer.

"Resiliency isn't just about being able to survive, but also how to thrive," McKee said.

Oreos are getting greener.

I don't mean the usual move by Oreo owner Mondelez International to add food coloring to cookies to market them for Easter or other holidays. In this case, we're looking at how prompting by advocacy group As You Sow resulted in Mondelez agreeing to cut its use of virgin plastics in packaging while increasing efforts to eliminate single-use plastics.

Mondelez set a target to reduce its use of virgin plastic by 5 percent by 2025, including a 25 percent cut in rigid plastic packaging, As You Sow said.

It will reach that target through the elimination of some plastics, redesigning packaging and exploring ways to reuse packaging.

PepsiCo Inc. also committed to reducing its use of virgin plastic, but it is still assessing specific cuts and a timeline to reach them.