FMHS APES Fourth Spring 2019

 The Disappearance of Honey Bees Besides making honey and stinging people, honey bees also provide a vital service to agriculture- pollination. Approximately 80& of crops in the US would suffer without the help of honey bees. Honey bees provide us with a colorful, varied, and nutritious diet. Along with pollinating crops for food, they also pollinate wildflower species that make our countryside beautiful. One of the most amazing foods, in my opinion, is honey. Honey is a very healthy alternative to sugar. I personally use honey rather than sugar in daily things like coffee and in baking. However, in the United States, beekeepers have seen the lifespan of bees decrease by more than half over the past decade. Scientists have linked this decrease to parasites, pesticides, and habitat loss. Recent evidence suggests that human activity such as land development, electromagnetic pollution, and the use of neonicotinoid pesticides is making it har for honey bees to reproduc...

Garbage Patches in the Ocean Delaney Pecky     Imagine the entire state of Texas covered in garbage. Now double that. That is how much trash has accumulated in the part of the ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This patch is located in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii and is the largest of the five garbage patches found in the ocean. Each year over one ton of plastic goes into the ocean through other bodies of water, including rivers, lakes, and streams. The plastic accumulated in this patch is estimated to weigh 80,000 tons and continues to grow.     These five garbage patches are caused by ocean gyres (rotating ocean currents) that collects all the trash in large areas of the ocean. Fishing gear, plastic bottles, and other litter that contributes to these patches has a big impact on marine life. These animals can get trapped, caught, and injured from the debris. Fishing nets in these gyres can trap fish or wrap aroun...

Should Donald Trump Build The Wall? By: Anthony Park The obvious answer to this question is simple: of course not. The creation the barrier, as Trump calls it, is meant to keep illegal immigrants from Mexico out of the US. This obviously wrong because one can't just simply remove an entire country from entering the US. Many people agree with this statement. According to the Pew Research Center, 60% of Americans opposed Trump's proposal of expanding the barrier, which is already 654 miles along the southern border. Not even the Democrats want the creation of the wall. Trump wants to make the barrier out of steel, as opposed to concrete, which will increase the cost; furthermore, even Donald Trump has no idea about the total cost to create the vast barrier. All of these downsides to the creation of the wall, and yet Trump still wants to create it. The economic and political evidence clearly does not stop Trump, but will the environmental consequences of the wall convince Trump...

by Lauren Pan Rewind back to 1935. Enrico Fermi discovered that when a radioactive substance such as Uranium is bombarded by neutrons, it produces by-products that are not Uranium and are lighter than the original sample. Enter nuclear energy, a clean and efficient way of boiling water to make steam, which turns turbines to produce electricity. Nuclear power plants use low-enriched uranium fuel to produce electricity through a process called fission—the splitting of uranium atoms in a nuclear reactor. Uranium fuel consists of small, hard ceramic pellets that are packaged into long, vertical tubes. Bundles of this fuel are inserted into the reactor. A single uranium pellet, slightly larger than a pencil eraser, contains the same energy as a ton of coal, 3 barrels of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. Each uranium fuel pellet provides up to five years of heat for power generation. And because uranium is one of the world’s most abundant metals, it can provide fuel for the world’s ...

By: Mallory Odom Americans use over 50 billion plastic water bottles each year. However, only 23% of these water bottles are actually recycled. This leaves roughly 38 billion water bottles worth of plastic being wasted each year. It’s unavoidable that society will completely stop drinking from plastic water bottles, but there is a big way we could start to limit the amount of plastic we waste. Using refillable water bottles is not only safer for you, it’s also cheaper, and simply more convenient. The best way to reduce the use of plastic water bottles is to use refillable water bottles. Some think that bottled water is safer to drink than tap water, but this is false. Most bottled water is really just filtered tap water, and it’s worth it to point out that bottled water from the store is only tested by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) weekly and the results are not released to the public while tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which requir...

By: Joshua No Envision yourself in the future having to live in a confined space with little to no healthy breathing conditions, and the inability to have your own privacy. This could very soon become a reality for the world, as soon as the year 2050, as the worlds population is estimated to be anywhere between 8 to 11 billion. At this moment in time, the earth can support the current human population however it is becoming evident that this will not last very long. The growing population could potentially become the driving force behind global warming, environmental pollution, and the reduction of natural resources such as fresh water and arable land.  The potential devastating effects of over population can be shown through the present day conditions of India, Singapore, Israel, and much more of the Middle East. In India especially, the population has reached 1.3 billion and is expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2030 and 1.7 billion by 2050. This massive population has...

AVINASH NAIR Recently, we explored the 'Tragedy of the Commons' through an experiment that saw us competing against our classmates for survival, in the form of Goldfish. However, as most of us saw, our 'corporate greed' and alarming willingness to destroy the environment for personal gain led to the unsustainable harvest of Goldfish, with many of us unwittingly depleting the Goldfish numbers beyond recovery. This taught most of us the valuable lesson of setting in place rules and regulations in an effort to effectively balance profit with sustainability. We then learned that in the real, non-Goldfish world, common resources are regulated primarily through the privatization of land, user institutions, and regulation by the government. While the privatization of land and user institutions seem to be proper measures to take in an effort to promote conservation, the regulation of land by the government got me thinking about just how much they...