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Raise your hand if you think that the tons and tons of plastic garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean are a good thing, something to be preserved and protected. Nobody? No hands up? Good. We all know that it’s ugly and harmful to wildlife; there’s no controversy there. Now, new research shows that it’s even worse than we imagined. Scientific American science writer Meghan Bartels describes a newly researched threat posed by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in this April 2023 report.

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We’ve all seen and heard scientific reports and arguments about climate change from scholars in many different disciplines—biology, geology, environmental sciences, chemistry, and many more, and those disciplines seem obviously relevant to the phenomenon. Here’s one from psychology. What does psychology have to do with climate change? Not much with the changes themselves, perhaps, but it may have a lot to do with the debates and controversies surrounding the issue. In this May 2023 essay in The Conversation, psychology professor Jeremy P. Shapiro proposes an explanation for climate change denial.

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