Where is the Missing Plastic?

In the current Plastic Age we’re living in, uneasiness about the levels of plastic pollution in our oceans is at an all time high. But there’s a massive gap between the plastic that’s being created and the comparatively little amount that we’re finding in our oceans [1].

How can cleaning up the ocean improve human life?

Last year, I came up with the idea to pick up at least one piece of trash outside each day. I did it for 70 days and picked up 128 pieces of trash. It wasn’t a lot, I learned that an average American produces 4-5 pounds of trash a day and I estimated that I picked up two pounds of garbage which was only half of what one American produces in one day. The more I picked up the more I saw, plastic is littered in every nook and cranny on earth, in our streets, waterways, backyards, forests and now in our food. This is a hard fact to evade now. We are eating and drinking plastics every day.

How do the Wonders of Human Spaceflight Impact an Astronaut’s Psyche?

    Astronauts have the unique opportunity to explore space and peer down on the planet, home to the society they know and the abundance of necessary resources to keep them alive. As these astronauts look down on the plentiful space available on Earth, these astronauts reside in a compact spacecraft with little privacy from other crew members. The conditions that these astronauts endure, are known as Isolated and Confined Extreme (ICE) environments. Explicitly, ICE environments are ones in which an individual is removed from society and placed in a restricted space, often for long durations of time ¹. Astronauts have been exposed to these extreme environments since the 1960s with the beginning of the Mercury Space Program. Exposure to these environments is not a new phenomenon; however, with an increased drive for exploration and research in space, going farther and farther from Earth, the psychological impacts of exposure to ICEs has become a significant area to guide the research of scientists in multiple discipline areas.