Meanwhile in … Belén, Costa Rica, a recycling drive set a new world record for bottle collection.
In Belén, Costa Rica, a recycling drive set a new world record for bottle collection. Guinness World Records officially bestowed the honor of “most plastic bottles recycled in eight hours” on the public-private recycling partnership Ecolones, which nabbed the title from a company in Mumbai. The recycling drive in Costa Rica collected about 66,500 pounds of bottles with the help of more than two dozen companies.
In Bristol, England, a new King Arthur story was discovered in an old manuscript. A librarian was looking for materials for medieval studies students when he uncovered fragments of the story in the archives of the Bristol Central Library. The narrative is from the “Story of Merlin” (which follows the wizard adviser to King Arthur) and contains previously unknown descriptions of battles fought by Arthur’s forces. They likely come from the texts that inform the famous “Le Morte d’Arthur” by Sir Thomas Malory.
In the Arctic Ocean, magnetic north is racing away from Canada and toward Siberia. There’s true north, which is a fixed location on the rotational axis of Earth, and then there’s magnetic north, which has historically drifted around slowly (at about six miles per year) in the vicinity of northern Canada. The movement is caused by the flow of liquid iron under Earth’s crust. But in the past 30 years, fast-moving liquid iron jets have sped up the pole’s motion (to around 35 miles per year) and sent it on a new trajectory to Siberia. The pole’s migration has been fast enough that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was unexpectedly forced to recalibrate its widely used mapping software that relies on magnetic north.
