Asteroids to trash to drought. What's not to love?

Huge asteroid will pass close to Earth Monday... can be seen with 'strong binoculars'.

A Dutch man decides to pick up plastic trash on his way to work.  A 20 year old tells us he can get the plastic out of our oceans.

Racism defined by a self-described redneck.

How we can address gun violence and gun safety.

It's not just California having an epic drought.

Why can't we do this?

Business recycles packaging and rubbish in Denmark (Automatic video start up).

Hurricanes hardly happen...

Reddit has a discussion about emergency and hurricane preparedness.

Bloomberg News: Romney ‘rented’ Mormon church’s exemption to defer taxes for 15 years

SOTP!

One thing about field biology.... itching.

Sweden wants your trash.

Friday cats on Monday:  Grumpy cat gets tickled.

Cat turns archaeologist.

Imagine the world without plastic

No, I can't either.  Will we ever be able to clean up what we have done?  Can we stop?

Why am I in this handbasket and why is it getting so warm?

Drowning in our own garbage.

Let the United States Holy Wars begin!  Lo, the Lord sayeth, smite them, smite them, smite them!!

Surviving the flesh eating virus, lightning, and boobs.

The dangers of for-profit schools and prisons, and why the Republicans are embracing them wholeheartedly: More bodies, more money to wring out of them, and no oversight! Such a deal! Quality of schooling and dedication to returning prisoners to society are not involved:

Leonard invokes the “numerous lawsuits” against a company called Corinthian Colleges, including one in which a former admissions officer described high-pressure, even bullying recruitment tactics at one of the company’s schools, Everest: “The ultimate goal was to essentially make [potential students] wallow in their grief,” the admission officer’s affidavit says, feel that pain of having accomplished nothing in life, and then use that pain as their “reasons” to compel the leads to schedule an in-person meeting with an Everest admissions representative. A spokesman for Corinthian denied this account of its recruiting, but, as Leonard writes, “there’s little question that an obsessive focus on constantly boosting enrollment is crucial to survival in the for-profit college world. Sky-high withdrawal rates plague the industry.”

Further down in the same article:

Chang’s series in the Times-Picayune, meanwhile, took a close look at how it is that Louisiana nearly doubled its prison population in the past twenty years, to become the state with the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the country—the highest in the world, in fact. (Adam Gopnik has written for The New Yorker about our mass-incarceration culture.) What Chang finds is a system under which the state began housing the majority of its inmates in for-profit facilities, many of them run by cash-strapped local sheriffs and some by private prison companies. Both have a financial incentive to keep the prisons full— like hotels, prisons in Louisiana don’t want any vacancies. “If the inmate count drops, sheriffs bleed money,” writes Chang. “Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.”

Japanese debris field in the Pacific

Washes back and forth and impacts Hawaii from both sides.

If we don't bomb ourselves to death

We will die buried in the garbage we create. Take a look at these 17 photos. Here is one:

An employee works inside the Caivano dump, near Naples, southern Italy, where rubbish is turned into bales. Neapolitans took the law into their own hands after the city ran out of space to dump rubbish
Photograph: Salvatore Laporta/AP

It will make you want to never have to throw anything out again...

Maybe this will keep the islands from disappearing under water

Garbage!

It may be known as a tropical paradise, an archipelago of 1,200 coral islands in the Indian Ocean. But the traditional image of the Maldives hides a dirty secret: the world's biggest rubbish island.

A few miles and a short boat ride from the Maldivian capital, Malé, Thilafushi began life as a reclamation project in 1992. The artificial island was built to solve Malé's refuse problem. But today, with more than 10,000 tourists a week in the Maldives adding their waste, the rubbish island now covers 50 hectares (124 acres).

So much is being deposited that the island is growing at a square metre a day. There are more than three dozen factories, a mosque and homes for 150 Bangladeshi migrants who sift through the mounds of refuse beneath palm-fringed streets.

Remember, folks, we're creating a new floating continent entirely made out of plastics as well! This is the wave of the future!

Update: The recycling business is collapsing! Buy more! How else can we keep this world economy afloat?

Plastic is forever

Honolulu, HI (AHN) -- Two men have successfully sailed from California to Hawaii in a raft made of plastic bottles and Cessna airplane parts.

Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal built their raft, which they named "Junk," out of 15,000 plastic bottles and a Cessna 310 fuselage. The purpose of their journey was to bring attention to the massive amount of plastic floating at sea.

The Northern Pacific Gyre, which has been getting some alternative media attention this year, is an area twice the size of Britain that swirls with tons of plastics used for water bottles, food containers, and various other one-time purposes.

Eriksen and Paschal described to reporters instances during their 2,600 mile journey when they caught a fish to eat, only to find plastic in its stomach when they cut it open.

During the 87 day journey, the two men saw first hand that "plastic is forever, and it's everywhere," as yahctpals.com reported Eriksen wrote in his journal at the end of the trip.

He went on to say that he plans to use the voyage as a starting point to create a dialogue about how to deal with the problem of disposable plastics.

This post deserves repeating:

Making a new continent
One plastic bag at a time:

­ ­In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and sailors rarely travel through the gyre. But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.

The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas [source: LA Times]. The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii. Each swirling mass of refuse is massive and collects trash from all over the world. The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Research flights showed that significant amounts of trash also accumulate in the Convergence Zone.

It's the world's biggest landfill and it's in the Pacific Ocean

Before you despair too much, another post mentions the teenage boy who discovered how to decompose plastic bags.

Awash

Early estimates suggest that the extent of the cleanup will be unlike anything some of the flooded cities have experienced. And some of what the water left behind is toxic, experts said, possibly tinged with raw sewage or chemical runoff from agriculture.

In Cedar Rapids alone, it is estimated that the 4,200 flooded houses are producing about a ton of debris each, mostly heavy appliances, electronics and furniture. Beyond that, businesses, schools, hospitals, churches and government offices are flooded, bringing the city’s total flood-related garbage load to about 300,000 tons, officials estimated.

A typical garbage truck can handle about four tons of trash.

“We’re looking at 10 to 15 times as much garbage as we’ve ever dealt with, so this is huge,” said Mark Jones, the superintendent of the city’s solid waste and recycling division. Backup trucks are arriving from across the state. “As you could see, it would take us forever to do this,” he said.

Lives destroyed by flooding occurs in the ocean as well:

Des Moines, IA (AHN) - The marine dead zone resulting from the Midwest flooding is expected to expand to over 10,000 square miles, according to researchers from the Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

The water in the dead zone, approximately the size of Massachusetts, does not have sufficient oxygen at depth to support marine life. Since 1990, the zone, located off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, usually covers 6,000 square miles, varying according to the flow of the Mississippi River.

What would we do without science?

Stealing this pic from perspicio of Today We Choose Faces:



(click the pic to read it)

To remind us what those who love the scientific process can do:

This month heralds a world-changing scientific breakthrough as a teenage prodigy has developed a new way to decompose plastic bags in just three months! A 16 year old named Daniel Burd conducted his experiment as a science fair project, and ended up with a revolutionary solution to the plastic plague that has laid waste to ecosystems around the world. By isolating the microorganisms that break down plastic, Burd’s research has yielded an industrially scalable way to cinch closed the material’s millennium-spanning life-cycle.

Plastic bags, once icons of customer convenience, cost more than 1.6 billion barrels of oil per year and leave the environment to foot the bill. The statistics are scary - each year the world produces 500 billion bags, and Earth Resource Foundation states that “all the plastic that has been made is still around in smaller and smaller pieces.” Meanwhile the UN Environment Program estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter in every square mile of ocean, and a swirling vortex of trash twice the size of Texas has spawned in the North Pacific.

I posted this in November of '07 and deserves a reprint:

Making a new continent: One plastic bag at a time

­ ­In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and sailors rarely travel through the gyre. But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.

The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas [source: LA Times]. The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii. Each swirling mass of refuse is massive and collects trash from all over the world. The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Research flights showed that significant amounts of trash also accumulate in the Convergence Zone.

It's the world's biggest landfill and it's in the Pacific Ocean.

Making a new continent

One plastic bag at a time:

­ ­In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and sailors rarely travel through the gyre. But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.

The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas [source: LA Times]. The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii. Each swirling mass of refuse is massive and collects trash from all over the world. The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Research flights showed that significant amounts of trash also accumulate in the Convergence Zone.

It's the world's biggest landfill and it's in the Pacific Ocean.

Do you know this dog?

German police investigating illegal rubbish dumping have released a photo of a striking toy dog found among the garbage in a bid to trace the culprit.

German police have issued a photo of a stuffed toy dog in a bid to catch an illegal rubbish dumper.

The cheeky looking 50-centimeter white mutt with black spots is dressed in a check jacket and appears to be chomping on a cigar.

He was found dumped on the edge of a forest along with parts of a heating oil tank, car tires and household rubbish.

"The police are hoping to get clues with the help of this striking-looking dog," police in the city of Marburg said in a statement.

"We haven't had any responses yet," a police spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

The best advice for those who really need to throw stuff out illegally is not to buy deranged stuffed animals that can rat on you in the first place...