Have you ever been troubled by the question of whether to buy a wine with a cork  or a screw top? In fact, the way to seal wines is also a tough problem for the wineries. 

       The root of the problem lies in “cork taint.” When some wine is sealed with a bad cork, there will be cork taint. Corks are made from a special oak tree growing around the Mediterranean. In the process of making corks and sealing wine bottles, a certain type of mold may start to grow in some corks. Over time, this mold may make the wine taste musty. Since cork taint affects one out of every ten bottles of wine, no packaging industry in the world would put up with such a high rate of failure. 

       Some wine makers try to solve the problem by sealing bottles with screw tops. However, many wineries are still playing it safe and sticking to corks for two reasons. First, cork users believe a small amount of oxygen is able to penetrate corks, not screw tops, and the oxygen is necessary for the proper aging of fine wines. The other problem arises from the image screw tops have with the public. In most people’s minds, screw tops are only found on cheap, low-quality wines. In addition, there is the problem of losing the romantic mood produced by the popping of the cork. 

       For the reasons above, it will take a lot of efforts for wineries to re-educate the public if they want to change the habit of the public.

    Having a seven-day week seemed strange to sociologists since there was no corresponding geophysical event as there was with the solar day or the lunar month. They tended to attribute it to our cultures and not to biology. However, other organisms also have a seven-day cycle, and a week is, after all, a quarter of a lunar circle. At the end of the French Revolution, the revolutionary government wanted to establish a ten-day week, but the attempt failed to work. In the former Soviet Union, the rulers also experimented with modifying the week by trying five-day and six-day weeks. Again, people rejected to change the length of their week. They seemed to need to have one day out of seven in order to rest their body clocks. Weekly rhythms show up most strongly during times of stress. For the body to fight off a cold, it needs about a week. The symptoms of chicken pox show up about two weeks after the patient’s being exposed to disease. Health care workers expect to see patients with pneumonia and malaria at greatest risk after one week of fighting these diseases. By these evidences, sociologists have had reasons to reconsider their previous ideas about the origin of the seven-day week.