The 2022 Winter Olympics may forever be known as the Bubble in Beijing thanks to the Chinese government’s efforts to maintain its Zero-Covid-19 strategy while admitting legions of athletes and coaches into the country. The Associated Press put together a photo essay showing the first glimpses of what the bubble looks like. For the time being, it looks pretty much as you’d expect. https://bit.ly/3GomSS1

The global pandemic has crystallized inequalities around the world and has also shown who are the most vulnerable members of society. It also demonstrated the groups considered expandable. In the United States, prisons hold thousands of humans Washington D.C. is unwilling to protect. Per STAT, “On his first full day in office, President Biden promised to order the federal Bureau of Prisons to reevaluate its Covid-19 protocols and release additional data on the spread of the virus in prisons, two in a slew of pledges aimed at ensuring the United States’ pandemic response was equitable. But that specific order never came. And now, as Covid-19 is spiking in multiple federal prisons around the country, spurred by the Omicron variant and still-substandard infection control, advocates say that the BOP’s Covid-19 protocols are as broken as ever.”  https://bit.ly/3oja4Go

For a long time, the story of monarch butterflies in the United States has consisted of doom and gloom projections. It seemed as if they were headed towards extinction. That narrative has changed slightly. Per Smithsonian Magazine, “Though monarch numbers increased, they are far from the millions that California saw in the 1980s. In 2020, this represented a 99.9 percent decline, write Pelton and Stephanie McKnight on Xerces’ blog. Scientists think threats including habitat loss and pesticide use caused population numbers to plummet.” The United States is home to two populations of monarch butterflies that are separated by the Rockies. The eastern population flies south to Mexico for the winter, while the western one overwinters in California. https://bit.ly/3Ggam72

Misguided construction has destroyed portions of a very important dinosaur trail in the United States. Per Science, “Paleontologists were dismayed this week to learn that early Cretaceous dinosaur prints at the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite near Moab, Utah, were damaged during efforts by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to repair a boardwalk there. A backhoe ran over some of the more than 200 tracks at the site, one of the richest in North America, according to scientists who saw the machine’s tracks atop several ancient prints on Sunday. ‘This was a bureaucratic screw-up,’ says Jim Kirkland, state paleontologist for the Utah Geological Survey, who’s familiar with the site and visited it Sunday.” Of course, the Bureau of Land Management denies anyting happened even though the cockup is pretty cut and dry. https://bit.ly/34qpW2H

Thanks for reading. Let’s be careful out there.