Silly Putty Experiment

In class the other day we made silly putty out of Borax water, and glue. What we did is we took about 2 table spoons of glue and mixed it in a plastic cup with a little bit of water, then we added a couple drops of borax and mixed it until it began to stick together and become gooey.
No whats the Science behind this? What happens is when you mix the glue with borax and water it produces a material called polymer, which is a long chain of molecules. Lots of natural as well as synthetic polymers will react in the same way to things like this. I found a interesting way to describe polymers online and the site said that they are a bit like cooked spaghetti :) .
this is what it said "When a pile of freshly cooked spaghetti comes out of the hot water and into the bowl, the strands flow like a liquid from the pan to the bowl. This is because the spaghetti strands are slippery and slide over one another. "

Current Events: After Mass Extinction Reefs Recover Faster the Previously Predicted!

Metzoan reefs went extinct 252 million years ago and today we discovered that it took them 1.5 million years to recover, less time the earlier predicted by scientists. Harsh living conditions are what caused such fluctuations in the carbon content and sea levels as well as oxygen deficiency caused the largest mass extinction of all time towards the end of the Permian era. Whats so amazing about this is that scientists always had predicted that it would take Earth 5 million years to recover rather that in 1.5 million! The reason this happened is the conditions of the environment went back to normal the reefs began continue grow again. This happened because the Metazoan oranisms in the reefs played a secondarty role in the reefs up until that time. This is how Hugo Bucher describes it "This shows that, after the extinction of dominant reef creators, metazoan were able to form reef ecosystems much sooner than was previously thought."

Here are the fossils that Scientists found for the reefs.