When I was younger I would occasionally catch a show on PBS imported from Canada called the Red Green Show.  I’m not really sure what it was about exactly, but it featured a gruff, scratchy-voiced Canadian named Red Green, who attempted to solve all of his problems with duct tape.  All of them.  For instance, I seem to recall an episode in which Red Green taped the bumper back on his van when it fell off, and he probably used the same roll to install a basketball hoop in his backyard, albeit temporarily – the …

Let’s assume for a moment that you are the Pope (because hey, this is the Internet and we can pretty much assume anything that suits our purposes, right?)  Okay, so let’s say your Holiness wants to head out of the Vatican and take a brief vacation at a villa that the Church happens to own on the Italian Sea Coast.  The ride out there shouldn’t be much of  problem danger-wise, because everybody knows that the “Popemobile” is bulletproof and “thicker than a 300 page novel” (Verrico).  But what if someone wants to cause trouble …

If you’ve ever accidentally superglued your fingers together, you know firsthand (so to speak) that adhesive forms powerful bonds with materials.  When it happened – a self-gluing accident happens to everyone eventually – you probably did a little Internet research (which was itself a challenge since you’d only eight or so unstuck fingers with which to type) and found out that superglue dissolves away with the application of a little acetone.  I bring this up to highlight a fundamental law of gluing: sticking two things together is useful; being able to unstick as them as needed is even more useful.  To that end, General Motors researchers have created an …