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POPSThe Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Also Know As The Trash Vortex 
Sad Picture: No one to blame for this but ourselves. Four fifths of the plastic detritus floating over 2.5 million square miles of ocean surface arrives there from land-based run off: from stormwater, in other words: litter. Sadly - many people take the "out of sight, out of mind" approach. Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up. We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic. All succeeding generations will only see an ocean filled with trash. Net a piece of plastic, and you’ll find barnacles and small crabs clinging to it. Not a good thing for fish, birds, and mammals that mistake it for its natural food, such as eggs, jellyfish, or other sea creatures. Most of the plastic will eventually photo-degrade into small, dust-like particles to the point that it will be non-detectable to the human eye, but ingestible by sea mammals, birds, and fish—many of which we then consume ourselves.
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POPSthe Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind "To a certain extent, memories are societal properties," says Adam Kolber, a visiting professor at Princeton. "We really need to articulate a moral code that governs all this," warns Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist.