Day: May 5, 2021💾
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Massive DDT dumping ground found off the Los Angeles coast is bigger than anyone thought | Live Science
The sea bottom near southern California has been hiding a very dirty secret: decades of discarded chemicals in thousands of barrels. And the toxic debris field is even bigger than anyone expected, containing at least 27,000 drums of DDT and industrial waste, scientists recently discovered.?
High concentrations of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, an insecticide that was widely used for pest control during the 1940s and 1950s) were previously detected in ocean sediments between the Los Angeles coast and Catalina Island, in 2011 and 2013. At the time, scientists who searched the seafloor in the area identified 60 barrels (possibly containing DDT or other waste) and found DDT contamination in sediments, but the full extent of the area's contamination was unknown.?
Now, a research expedition presents a clearer picture of the deep-sea dump site. Their findings reveal a stretch of ocean bottom studded with at least 27,000 industrial waste barrels — and possibly as many as 100,000, researchers with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California said in a statement.?
The solution to the plastic waste crisis? It isn’t recycling | Environment | The Guardian
The Lego Disney Frozen II Arendelle Castle Village features a princess, animals, birds and mini dolls. It is made of 521 separate bits of plastic, it was one of the bestselling Christmas toys, and fans of the movie on which it is based will surely spend several hours of magical, creative play with it.
But those few hours may well be the last that this and many other toys are used. Thousands of plastic castles, farmyards and games, as well as myriad other presents, have probably already been stuffed into bulging cupboards to be thrown away in a year or two to make room for yet more plastic. And, because most plastic is near impossible to recycle, these toys will probably have to be landfilled or burned in incinerators, poisoning the air and further adding to global heating.
I Can’t Spell Schenectady – 1953
The Land Beyond the Pines.
How a university got itself banned from the Linux kernel – The Verge
In “On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits,” Lu and Wu explained that they’d been able to introduce vulnerabilities into the Linux kernel by submitting patches that appeared to fix real bugs but also introduced serious problems. The group called these submissions “hypocrite commits.” (Wu didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story; Lu referred me to Mats Heimdahl, the head of the university’s department of computer science and engineering, who referred me to the department’s website.)
The explicit goal of this experiment, as the researchers have since emphasized, was to improve the security of the Linux kernel by demonstrating to developers how a malicious actor might slip through their net. One could argue that their process was similar, in principle, to that of white-hat hacking: play around with software, find bugs, let the developers know.