Questões Militares

Texto 1

                  LANDFILLS AND THE INTRODUCTION OF NANOMATERIALS IN WASTE

      Waste disposal on land (dumping) and landfilling remain the most prominent waste management techniques used ______. The standards and practices for this type of waste disposal vary greatly ranging from uncontrolled sites to highly specialised and controlled engineered landfills. The potential ______ of contaminants through landfill gas and leachate is largely dependent on landfill design, site conditions and the sophistication of the control measures in place, ______ landfill gas recovery and leachate collection and treatment systems.

Modern engineered landfills use ______ barriers, with few relying on natural barriers, to line the bottom of a landfill and incorporate collection systems for both leachate and landfill gas. The purpose of these collection systems is to capture and treat leachate and landfill gas; ______ preventing the migration of leachate into ground/surface water and the release of untreated landfill gases to the atmosphere. An un-engineered landfill would be considered an uncontrolled system due to the lack of environmental controls, potentially resulting in significant environmental exposure of contaminants.

      Because of widespread use of ENMs in a broad range of products, it is possible that some ENMs ______ through landfill gases; however this report will primarily focus on ENMs that may be present in landfill leachate, as this is considered to be the primary means by which ENMs could be transported______ a landfill. Characterisation of landfill gases to identify the presence of ENMs ______ an important area for further research.

      Landfill leachate is generated when rain passes through the waste mass and by the liquid generated due to the breakdown of waste ______ the landfill. The composition of leachate is extremely ______ depending on the type of waste landfilled, the quantity of precipitation, the construction and operation of the landfill, the age of the landfill and other factors such as pH, temperature and microbial populations.

                                                                              (…)

ENMs = engineered nanomaterials.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Landfills and the introduction of nanomaterials in waste. In: Landfilling of waste containing nanomaterials and nanowaste, 2015. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 22/04/2015. 

                               Would it be wrong to eradicate mosquitoes?

      The mosquito is the most dangerous animal in the world, carrying diseases that kill one million people a year. Now the Zika virus, which is carried by mosquitoes, has been linked with thousands of babies born with brain defects in South America. There are 3,500 known species of mosquitoes, but only the females from just 6% of species draw blood from humans - to help them develop their eggs. Of these, just half carry parasites that cause human diseases.

      More than a million people, mostly from poorer nations, die each year from mosquito-borne diseases, including Malaria, Dengue Fever and Yellow Fever. Some mosquitoes also carry the Zika virus, which was first thought to cause only mild fever and rashes. However, scientists are now worried that it can damage babies in the womb. There’s a constant effort to educate people to use nets and other tactics to avoid being bitten. But would it just be simpler to make an entire species of disease-carrying mosquito extinct?

      In Britain, scientists at Oxford University and the biotech firm Oxitec have genetically modified (GM) the males of Aedes aegypti - a mosquito species that carries both the Zika and Dengue viruses. These GM males carry a gene that stops their offspring from developing properly. This second generation of mosquitoes then die before they can reproduce and become carriers of disease themselves.

      So are there any downsides to removing mosquitoes? Mosquitoes, which mostly feed on plant nectar, are important pollinators. They are also a food source for birds and bats while their young - as larvae - are consumed by fish and frogs. This could have an effect further ahead in the food chain. Mosquitoes also have limited the destructive impact of humanity on nature. Mosquitoes make tropical rainforests, for humans, virtually uninhabitable. Rainforests are home to a large share of our total plant and animal species, and nothing has done more to delay man-made destruction over the past 10,000 years than the mosquito.

                                                   Adapted from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35408835

                                How Brazil Crowdsourced a Pioneering Law

The passage of the Marco Civil da Internet, an “Internet bill of rights” commonly referred to in English as the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, demonstrates how the Internet can be used to rejuvenate democratic governance in the digital age. The law is important not only for its content, but for the innovative and participatory way it was written, bypassing traditional modes of legislation-making to go directly to the country’s citizens. At a moment when governments of all kinds are viewed as increasingly distant from ordinary people, Brazil’s example makes an argument that democracy offers a way forward.

      The pioneering law was signed in 2014 and has three components. First, it safeguards privacy by restricting the ability of private corporations and the government to store Internet users’ browsing histories. Second, it mandates a judicial review of requests to remove potentially offensive or illegal material, including content that infringes copyrights. And third, it prohibits Internet service providers from manipulating data transfer speeds for commercial purposes. The bill was acclaimed by activists as an example the rest of the world should follow.

      What makes this law even more interesting is that it became one of the largest-ever experiments in crowdsourcing legislation. The law’s original text was written through a website that allowed individual citizens and organizations — including NGOs, businesses, and political parties — to interact with one another and publicly debate the law’s content. This process was markedly different from the traditional method of writing bills “behind closed doors” in the halls of Congress, a process that favored well-connected families and large corporations.

      Policymakers in other countries have tried to capture citizen input using social media before, but never on this scale, in a country of roughly 200 million people. Whether it would succeed was far from certain. During the website’s public launch, in 2009, one of the government lawyers summed up the organizers’ high hopes: “This experience could transform the way we discuss not just legislation about the Internet, but also the way we discuss other bills in Brazil, and, in so doing, reconfigure our democracy.”

Adapted from http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/19/how-brazil-crowdsourced-a-landmark-law/