Interesting Facts

According to cognitive scientist, Guy Claxton, rubbers (erasers) are instruments of the devil and has called for them to be banned from classrooms. (Strong words, I hear you say, but his argument is that they encourage children to feel ashamed of their mistakes, and perpetuate a culture of shame about errors. "It’s a way of lying to the world, which says ‘I didn’t make a mistake. I got it right first time.’ That’s what happens when you can rub it out and replace it," he said. Now you know why you can't correct your posts in the forum!)

Rubber bands last longer if they're kept in the fridge. (When a rubber band is in the fridge it relaxes the polymers, but you should let it warm up before trying to use it. If you have ever found a rubber band in the drawer that snapped in two when you tried to use it, this could be a useful fact.)

More than 13,000 red rubber bands are to be sent back to Royal Mail. (It's part of a protest by the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, because postmen in the UK keep littering the streets and people's front gardens with the red rubber bands that are used to hold mail together. Interestingly Deutsche Post seem to use the same bands, and we have the same problem. I'm going to start gathering them up for my own little protest.)

The Beijing Games are the last time table tennis players will be allowed to use speed glue to re-fix the rubber surfaces to the racket or paddle. (So called speed glues contain volatile organic compounds, and expose the players to potentially harmful chemicals. However, not everyone is happy about the ban, seemingly gas produced by the chemicals seeps into the bat's rubber covering and stretches the rubber giving it a tension that in turn makes the ball behave like an object meeting a trampoline, hence the term speed glue. Critics charge that the glue ban is a veiled attempt to slow the rapid-fire sport. The ban was supposed to take place as of 1 September 2007, but the date was moved back to 1 September, 2008. From September the International Table Tennis Federation will introduce a doping test for bats - a device that can detect whether the illegal glue is present in the rubber covering.)

Magdalena Laue, from Halle in Germany, devised a one-piece waterproof nappy made from India rubber in the 1890s. (And landfill has never been the same again.) !Note - A nappy is BrE, it is called a diaper in AmE .