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fakescience:

     Today in the news they showed several interviews at hair-salons talking about how donating your hair can help the Oil Spill in the Golf of Mexico. This seems like a descent idea. Hair does a very good job at sucking up oil.  It’s adsorbent rather than absorbent, which means that oil clings to the many tiny scales on each strand of hair. Anyway, the donated hair would be sent to the non-profit organization Matter of Trust. The question is, would the donated hair really be used?

     When trying to stop ongoing spill, BP engineers lowered a four-story high containment dome onto the leaking pipe. Unforunetly, that didn’t go so well. As for the spill that had already reached the ocean’s surface, they decided on having boats place polyethylene pads (skimmers) on the surface to absorb the oil. This method recovered 3.6 million gallons of oil-water mix. The second method is using fire-resistant booms called ‘in situ burns’. This burned more than 1,000 bbl of oil.

“When it works, burning is one of the more effective means available for dealing with a spill,” Jeffrey Short. “But for burning to succeed, the sea must be calm and the oil must not have mixed much with the water. Storms in the Gulf have limited the usefulness of in situ burns for the spill.” -Michael Torrice

     Thus far, the most effect method has been having planes spray dispersants onto the slicks. The hydrophobic portions of the surfactants would encircle the oil, and their hydrophilic ends contact the water to form micelles.

“In three tests since April 25, boats have pumped dispersants down to remotely operated underwater vehicles near the leaks. Those vehicles aimed the dispersants at the leaking oil plume. Using the vehicles’ video cameras, engineers watched as the mixture scattered the oil into the water column.” -Michael Torrice

     Therefore, hair booms are not being used in the cleaning up of oil spills. If you wish to donate your hair in hopes that maybe, just maybe there will be a time in which it shall be used, then by all means, go ahead. Other ways in which you can have your hair become more useful to society, is donating it to wig-making organizations for cancer patients such as Locks-of-Love.

     June 4, 2010 — SpaceX launched Falcon 9. SpaceX is a private American space transport company founded by Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal). It has been a while since the Falcon 9 was integrated into the Cape Canaveral on December of 2008. But the flight that took place this past Friday was a successful and safe one. This accomplishment gives Obama’s proposal a good start. This being that NASA spaceflight should also be open to commercial space companies.

“In President Barack Obama’s new plan for NASA, a new player has been taken center stage - American capitalism and entrepreneurship - and today’s SpaceX launch strengthens my hope that commercial space companies will at long last remove the cost barrier that slows our exploration of the solar system,” Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, said in a statement from the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group.

     Many are enthusiastic about the changes this development can bring to our nation. However, not everyone agrees. According to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison:

“Even this modest success is more than a year behind schedule, and the project deadlines of other private space companies continue to slip as well… this test does not change the fact that commercial space programs are not ready to close the gap in human spaceflight if the space shuttle is retired this year with no proven replacement capability and the Constellation program is simultaneously cancelled as the President proposes.”

Reference:
SpaceX
New York Times