She submitted “Oblivionaire” as a word that, according to her, is a billionaire who chooses to be blind to the disparity and inequality that his or her wealth is creating....
BITS ‘N’ PIECES
Rohana Khattak, 16, from Pakistan won The New York Times “Invent a Word” challenge by suggesting a noun for some leaders of the globalised economy.
She submitted “Oblivionaire” as a word that, according to her, is a billionaire who chooses to be blind to the disparity and inequality that his or her wealth is creating.
Derivation: a combination of “oblivious” and “billionaire”
Rohana’s explanation for why this word is needed: According to Oxfam International, the “world’s 10 richest men more than doubled their fortunes” to $1.5 trillion “during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty.
“We live in an era that has multiple global catastrophes taking place at the same time and inequality to the point that, while millions of children are starving to death, others have more money than they can spend. This egregious imbalance is not drawing enough attention, and we need to have the vocabulary to name the people who, in the lap of luxury, detach themselves from responsibility to the millions of people suffering and in agony around the planet.”
Scientists have created a moving magnetic slime capable of encircling smaller objects, self-healing and “very large deformation” to squeeze and travel through narrow spaces.
The slime, which is controlled by magnets, is also a good electrical conductor and can be used to interconnect electrodes, its creators say.
The dark-coloured magnetic blob has been compared on social media to Flubber, the eponymous substance in the 1997 sci-fi film, and described as a “magnetic turd” and “amazing and a tiny bit terrifying”..
The slime contains magnetic particles so that it can be manipulated to travel, rotate, or form O and C shapes when external magnets are applied to it.
The slime has “visco-elastic properties”, Prof Li Zhang, who co-created the slime, said. This means that “sometimes it behaves like a solid, sometimes it behaves like a liquid”.
It is made of a mixture of a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol, borax – which is widely used in cleaning products – and particles of neodymium magnet.
“It’s very much like mixing water with [corn] starch at home,” Zhang said. Mixing the two produces oobleck, a non-Newtonian fluid whose viscosity changes under force. “When you touch it very quickly it behaves like a solid. When you touch it gently and slowly it behaves like a liquid,” Zhang said.
The scientists envisage the slime could be useful in the digestive system, for example in reducing the harm from a small swallowed battery.
The magnetic particles in the slime, however, are toxic themselves. The researchers coated the slime in a layer of silica – the main component in sand – to form a hypothetically protective layer.
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