Today in 1912, the birthday of actor House Peters Jr., the first live action Mr. Clean on TV commercials. We'll explain how the character got his name, his look and his worldwide reputation.
Each year New York City hosts huge crowds hoping to see the famous ball drop. But once the giant party is done and the revelers have headed home, the giant cleanup effort begins.
There was a really interesting piece on J-STOR recently that washes away the widespread idea that the Middle Ages in Europe was just unbelievably filthy. Why is it that we think the Middle Ages WAS so dirty?
A lot of us turn to paper towels when there’s a mess to be addressed, but they could also be greener. Researchers are developing a reusable kitchen towel made of hydrogel.
Summer is beach season, and for those times when people leave litter and other waste behind, there are two separate projects to develop robots to clean up after them.
A device in Denmark, WasteShark, has been roaming through water to scoop up floating debris. Now it's going to have a flying companion drone to help spot waste and maybe even clean up oil spills. Plus: photographer Nancy Floyd has been taking self-portraits and other images, structured the same way, day after day since 1982, to show the passage of time. Talk about playing the long game.
This sounds bonkers, but apparently a robotic cleaning system called HullSkater can remove bio-gunk off the hulls of ships, helping them reduce their carbon footprints.
A startup called Beetl is developing an autonomous device that’s ready to clean up after our dogs on demand, thanks to a large scooper on its underside. If they’re willing to do this job, maybe robots aren’t trying to conquer us after all.
If you were a royal several hundred years ago, this might be a time when you’d pack up and leave the castle for one of your other castles, so the staff could clean out all the filth!
Astronauts have a lot of cleaning to do. But there are plans for a new system that would disinfect the interiors of spacecrafts and space stations with ultraviolet lights.
