• When I was born, my parents were in their late 30s.
• Once I realized they were older than most of my friends' parents, I started to worry.
• However, my anxiety has subsided over the years; I've learned to be grateful for the time we have.

When I was born in the winter of 1991, my mother was 39 years old. She turned 40 before my first birthday, while my dad hit the big 4-0 when I was only 2. Their reasoning for having children later than many of their peers was multifaceted: they didn't meet until their late 20s, then school took center stage for a decade or so, pushing kids out of the picture for another decade.

For much of my early childhood, I didn't know the difference between my parents and my friends' (often younger) parents. In fact, I don't think I can point to a single instance when my parents' age even crossed my mind before I entered elementary school. They were just my parents — my playmates and role models — and that was it.

Then, while chatting on the first-grade playground, a new friend and I started talking about our family members' birthdays and ages. My mom was 46, I told her. With wide eyes, she shared that her mom was just 26. Her grandmother, who'd also had children very young, was only in her early 40s.

Suddenly, I came to the staggering realization that my parents were older than some of my friends' grandparents. A quick blip in a casual conversation set off an anxiety that would be hard to shake.

My parents' age became a source of worry

My anxiety around my parents' age grew as I got older, as did my generalized anxiety, though I wasn't officially diagnosed with an anxiety disorder until late high school. The most common theme of my worry was losing my parents prematurely because of their age. I remember sitting awake at night, mentally calculating how old each of my parents would be when I reached particular milestones.

When I was 10, they'd be nearing 50. When I graduated from high school, their 60s would loom. If I got married at 30, they'd be 70. The math made me feel scared and isolated as I wondered if they'd be there to mark special occasions, like I expected most of my friends' parents to be.

Over the years, I noticed subtle and not-so-subtle differences between my parents and others. While many of my friends' parents were fans of modern pop music or enamored with tunes from the '80s, mine introduced me to '60s and '70s classic rock. We had a record player in the living room that spun everything from Pink Floyd to Carole King, remnants of my parents' youth.

I know "oldies" were likely a fixture for some younger parents, too, but I grew to love the fact that I could identify songs on the classic rock station — and it became a fun way to connect with my mom and dad, who had seen some of these artists perform live.

By the time I reached high school, a trend in my friendships emerged: I was (mostly unconsciously) drawn to friends who were also in the "old parents club." Many of my pals with younger parents were still around, of course, but I made quick bonds with those who could relate to the unique anxieties and delights of having parents with similar (read: more… mature) life experiences. Once I learned I wasn't alone in my plight, I slowly began to see my situation as more of a blessing than a curse.

Despite the pitfalls, I'm grateful to have older-than-average parents

As each life experience was checked off my list — high school graduation, college, first "real" job, engagement, marriage, and eventually having my own daughter at age 32 — I was overwhelmed with gratitude that my parents are still around. I'd made the painful realization that age wasn't the only metric in my worries; I watched friends and classmates lose parents of all ages far too early, which drove home the point that even if my parents had been 25 when I was born, it wouldn't have guaranteed a darn thing.

Today, I watch my parents enjoy new grandparenthood in their 70s, and I still grapple with a mixture of appreciation and nagging anxiety. My childhood worries (and mental math-ing) haven't entirely subsided, though I manage them more effectively with a combination of therapy, medication, and mindfulness. While I struggle to assuage the very human experience of anticipatory grief, I'm determined not to waste the present moment lamenting uncertainties about the future.

And while I might snarkily poke fun at my parents for falling into baby boomer stereotypes (like accidentally texting me 10-minute-long voice memos of nothing but grocery store background noise) on occasion, gratitude prevails. Gratitude for the childhood they gave me and my brother, for spending their 40s and 50s chasing me around on all my shenanigans, for the things they continue to teach me, and for their dedication to showing up for me and my daughter — even when their knees are a bit creaky. All of it has happened right on time.

• Three teenagers in New York designed a cardboard, called Kiriboard, to replace plastic packaging.
• They got the idea when a box of motors for their robotics hobby arrived damaged.
• Their invention won the $12,500 Earth Prize. Now they plan to buy a machine to make more Kiriboards.

Three teenage boys in New York City have invented a clever packaging material that they hope will replace toxic plastics and make plastic-free shipping a reality.

Zhi Han (Anthony) Yao, Flint Mueller, and James Clare are planning to pursue a patent and eventually pitch their product to Home Depot, as well as traditional shippers like Amazon, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.

They call their geometric, cardboard invention Kiriboard, since it's inspired by Japanese kirigami, which is the art of cutting and folding paper.

"Something like this is the wave of the future," Jerry Citron, the teenagers' environmental-science teacher, told Business Insider.

Yao, Mueller, and Clare won the Earth Prize on April 8, making them one of seven winning environmental projects by teenagers across the globe. The award comes with $12,500, which they plan to use to buy a cutting machine, called a CNC router, and test more prototypes.

Plastic-free shipping could change the world

Just like any plastic, Styrofoam and other plastic packaging can shed microscopic bits of plastic into homes and the environment.

Microplastics have been detected from the oceans to the top of Mount Everest, in animals' and humans' body tissues and blood, and even in rain all over the planet. They're associated with heart attack and stroke risk. Some researchers suspect they could even be contributing to the recent rise in colon cancers in young people.

"I didn't realize it was as big of an issue as it was," Yao told BI. "I mean, companies have made sustainable initiatives and greener initiatives, but they haven't really fully replaced plastic packaging."

Enter the Kiriboard: Kiriboard is cut into lattice-like shapes so that it can bend to fill the space between an item and the wall of its box. The cuts give the cardboard a three-dimensional structure that makes it sturdy and allows it to bend and absorb impact, protecting what's inside, similar to bubble wrap but without the plastic.

Once perfected, the three teens hope their design can help ship packages of sensitive or heavy equipment even more securely, at a competitive price.

Broken motors and crumple zones

Clare, Mueller, and Yao are all on the same robotics team at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Clare is a junior, and Mueller and Yao are seniors.

The idea for Kiriboard started when they opened a shipment of Kraken X60 motors, which are about $200 a pop. They found that the brass pins, which connect the motors to a robot, were damaged and unusable. They assumed the pins had been damaged in transit.

"We're like, well, we should do something about this packaging, because clearly the packaging wasn't good enough," Mueller said.

Clare thought about how cars are engineered with crumple zones, meant to absorb the energy of impacts to protect the people inside.

Similarly, he said, "you can make strategic weak points in your packaging so that the package warps and deforms," sparing the package's contents.

With help from the Earth Prize program and Citron, they built and tested their first Kiriboard prototypes.

The matrix

It was a scrappy effort, with cardboard scavenged from their school.

After some research and consulting various teachers, Yao said they drew up eight or nine different designs, and narrowed down to four to build and test. Then, came the fun part: dropping heavy stuff on their creations.

To test their prototypes' durability, the teens slammed them with a roll of tape, a stapler, a can of soda, and a metal water bottle — "which did the most damage, but not as much as we thought it would," Clare said.

They dropped each item onto the Kiriboard prototypes from various heights, so that they could calculate and study the physical forces of each impact.

"Basically, we want to see what's the most amount of force it can take before it snaps," Yao said.

The results were promising, the trio said. The Kiriboard prototypes sustained very little damage, which they judged by checking the cardboard for dents. They plan to move forward with all four designs, which they hope will be useful for different types of shipping.

In the design pictured above, four triangular "legs" hold the Kiriboard in place inside a box.

"This middle section, we call it the matrix. This is supposed to be flexible," Yao said. Once you place an item for shipping inside the box, the matrix "is supposed to form to the product."

Once they've purchased a CNC router to automate cutting the cardboard, they plan to test prototypes by actually shipping them in boxes.

"Right now, we want to perfect our product," Yao said.

When it's ready, they said they might also pitch it to the electronics company AndyMark, which shipped them the robotic motors that arrived broken.

"No shade to them," Clare said, adding that their robotics team frequently orders from AndyMark with no problems.

"We're on the brink of, like, this could become a reality, and it's just up to us to put in that final effort," Mueller said. Clare chimed in: "All from a broken package."

Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. It’s built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We have known what plant cells look like without their walls, and we know what they look like when the walls are fully assembled, but we’ve never seen the wall-building process in action. “We knew the starting point and the finishing point, but had no idea what happens in between,” says Eric Lam, a plant biologist at Rutgers University. He’s a co-author of the study that caught wall-building plant cells in action for the first time. And once we saw how the cell wall building worked, it looked nothing like how we drew that in biology handbooks.

Camera-shy builders

Plant cells without walls, known as protoplasts, are very fragile, and it has been difficult to keep them alive under a microscope for the several hours needed for them to build walls. Plant cells are also very light-sensitive, and most microscopy techniques require pointing a strong light source at them to get good imagery.

Then there was the issue of tracking their progress. “Cellulose is not fluorescent, so you can’t see it with traditional microscopy,” says Shishir Chundawat, a biologist at Rutgers. “That was one of the biggest issues in the past.” The only way you can see it is if you attach a fluorescent marker to it. Unfortunately, the markers typically used to label cellulose were either bound to other compounds or were toxic to the plant cells. Given their fragility and light sensitivity, the cells simply couldn’t survive very long with toxic markers as well.

Read full article

Comments