Join us to discuss "The Art of Saving Relics" by Sarah Everts. Find it on page 1 of "Best American Science & Nature Writing – 2017."
The summary from Scientific American:
- Much of our modern cultural heritage, from acrylic paintings to Legos to spacesuits, is made of plastic chemicals.
- Plastics do not last forever but deteriorate into messy molecular fragments, and this instability can ruin paintings and other important objects.
- Conservators have new methods to identify early warning signs of decay and to clean the disintegrating art, tailoring the technique to the underlying chemistry.
Here is a related article: Conserve Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit.
