President Trump within his first week in office signed an executive order to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. While his entire plan to build a wall is financially wasteful and wouldn't stop what it is meant to stop, others note its environmental impacts. According to Jamie Condliffe of the MIT Technology Review, a wall 1000 miles long, 50 feet tall, 15 feet underground, and 1 foot thick means about 9.7 million cubic meters of concrete and 2.3 billion kilograms of steel.
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1. In late December, Scientific American published an article concerning some recent developments in the fight against WNS. According to Kate Langwig, a researcher, little brown bats have actually been increasing in the past few years in New York, where the disease has been for quite a while. Furthermore, the fungus grows during early winter, but then simply stops by late winter. It also must be noted, thought, that in places where the disease is newly established (Illinois and West Virginia cited in the article), the fungal growth doesn't experience the same dropoff in growth. Langwig suspects that the bats have something that inhibits the growth of the fungus and looks to find out what and how to implement it in bats in other areas.
This year and month mark the 10th anniversary of the release of the ever prevalent iPhone. While its purpose was revolutionary, its aftermath is so great. While Apple claims on its website to seek for ways to reduce its carbon footprint, reduce poisons in its products, recycle production waste and farm its materials sustainably, it isn't so great at helping the environment once its consumers are "done" with their product.
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March 2019
"There is nothing in which the birds differ more than man than the way that they can build and yet leave the landscape as it was before." |