Dolly doldrums

(Photograph) - Dolly doldrums: a mysterious disease afflicting collectors' valuable dolls made in the 1940s and 1950s, which made them buckle, bloat and build up a brown sticky liquid, has been cured by Bradford scientists. Howell Edwards, Tony Johnson and Ian Lewis, using Raman spectroscopy, found tiny iron hooks holding the dolls together and in their eye mechanisms. The iron reacts with the hard plastic of the dolls, which degrades.