Jan 31

News in Micro: Feb 2020 Edition

Read the Great Swamp Watershed Association blog to find out what’s going on in microplastic news in the Great Swamp watershed, Passaic River region, New Jersey, and the rest of the world. What are microplastics? Start here for the who, what, where, why, and hows of microplastics.

Great Swamp – Passaic River – New Jersey News

Arts

  • The Biodiversity Heritage Library has 150,000 botanical and animal illustrations free to download. – This is Colossal.com – Billed as the world’s largest open access digital archive dedicated to life on Earth, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is comprised of animal sketches, historical diagrams, botanical studies, and various scientific research collected from hundreds of thousands of journals and libraries around the globe.
  • The Insect Jewelry Of the Victorian Age, JSTOR.org –  “The wing-cases of gold-enameled weevils hung from necklaces; muslin gowns were embroidered with the iridescent green elytra of jewel beetles. Tiny golden scarabs were glued to the petals of artificial flowers. Delicate moths were perched on hairpins, to float above curls.”

A design for a necklace with Brazilian Beetles, ca. 1900 via Wikimedia Commons

 

Biology

Business

Cringeworthy

  • Dismantling the Clean Water Act., NJSpotlight.com – Wetlands and waterways across the country are at risk for an influx of contamination.

    Pictured: Buttermilk Falls, Morris County, NJ – EPA’s action ignores recommendations of president’s own Science Advisory Board on intermittent streams and wetlands.

Health and Wellness

Science and Tech

  • Holograms Help Scientists See “Invisible” Microplastics., AdvancedScienceNews.com – Machines trained to image microplastic particles smaller than 1mm shed new light on “invisible plastics”, and give scientists new insights into the size of the pollution problem.
  • Plastic “Pouring” Into Antarctica., Sky News.com, In the first attempt to quantify how much plastic has reached the pristine continent, scientists on British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) ship the James Clark Ross have filtered the water in fjords along the Antarctic Peninsula and the results are not good.

    SkyNews: Life in the Antarctic put into greater risk by the plastic problem

    News In Micro is compiled by Kristina Necovska, GSWA Membership, GIS, and Social Media guru.

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