Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
AYAAN SHAH (L6P) Take a look around you, how many different materials can you see? Your device, which you are using to read this article, is composed of hundreds of tiny components, each made up of a myriad of materials, each designed and used for a specific purpose. Or consider the window - decades of innovation in material production have led to the windows we have today, transparent yet insulative. Recently, I stumbled upon an exciting field of science that spans physics, chemistry, and biology: materials science. I believe that this field will play a crucial role in the future of society and civilization, and in this article, we will examine the history, technology, and employment of a material we rely on every day: glass! The original raw materials of glass production comes from sand. Sand is formed when rocks compress with each other over a long period of time, creating small crystals known as quartz. These quartz crystals have a chemical composition of silicon dioxide, which is ...