Memory Foam: Friend or Fume?

My earliest encounters with “memory foam” was some 15 years ago when my aunt brought a memory foam pillow from the USA to South Africa, where I was living at the time. I remember being amazed at this apparent new technology that I heard had been developed by NASA for use in space. No one else in the country had such a pillow of what I believed to be cutting edge technology that would magically conform to the shape of your face. How cool is that? I don’t sleep comfortably unless I use my “memory foam” pillow.

Roll forward to today and the marvel of this product has worn off somewhat. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I am further chronologically challenged, have a small child now, and am studying public health, but when I opened up the mattress-in-a-box “memory foam” mattress, I excitedly purchased last week, I was suddenly overwhelmed by extremely noxious fumes that emanated from the strange foam that popped out of the box. Thinking to myself that this cannot be healthy for a small child and pregnant wife, I began looking closer at what I previously thought to be a technological wonder was exposing us to so intimately.

Speed: To thrill or to kill?

My childhood memories of things I aspired to acquire later in life revolved predominantly around a series of super-charged automobiles, each surpassing the previous, sometimes due to aesthetic beauty but always due to performance. There was the Diablo, the F40, and then the Bugatti Veyron. Today the fastest production car is the SSC Ultimate Aero with a top speed of 257mph.  I recall paging through my dad’s old magazines to find a test for a car and flipping forward to find its performance ratings. I would avidly read up about its acceleration, top-speed and power to mass ratio. Once licensed to drive, I reveled in the thrill of driving rather too fast and too reckless. While I never had a major disaster, and thus lived to write this piece, in one piece, I did have several narrow scrapes which inevitably preempted a period of more responsible driving (lasting only until I forgot that I wasn’t totally invincible).