On this day, 22 February 1860, the biggest strike in the pre-civil war United States began, of New England shoemakers. At that time adults worked 16 hour days in the factories, children working 10, while men earned just $3 per week, and women only $1 per week. 3000 workers held mass meetings in Lynn and Natick, Massachusetts, and decided to walk out and set up a strike committee.
Strikers travelled all over New England trying to spread the strike, and after a few days, women working as stitchers and binders joined them in walking out. Within a week, 20,000 were out across 25 towns in the region.
Police from Boston were dispatched to Lynn to try to break the strike, and were met by a crowd of 8000 people jeering and hissing at them. The male workers didn’t include women’s pay in their demands, so the women returned to work.
On 10 April, 30 employers agreed to increase wages by 10%, and workers began to trickle back to work. Within a few weeks, the strike was over.
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Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.
The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug.
The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.”
The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic – far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process.
