I learned about the importance of sand (and other media) this year when setting up a saltwater tank for my s.o.; I really had no idea beforehand.
Sand provides a huge amount of surface area for colonies of bacteria responsible for converting ammonia into nitrites and nitrites into nitrates, which can then be taken up by plants or algae and converted into other chemicals that are less harmful to aquatic species.
Dredging sand from rivers and beaches is likely going to be seen as a massive ecological disaster in the next couple of decades.
One of my favorite factoids is that in many deserts, the most common plant life by weight is algae. It grows in tiny drops of dew on the underside of grains of sand.
2. something fictitious or unsubstantiated that is presented as fact, devised especially to gain publicity and accepted because of constant repetition.
To my mind, the connotation of factoid is that it's not false, but it's too simplified or stripped of context to be wholly accurate.
Consider, "Did you know that squids have eyes as big as bicycle tires?" That's not completely made up (squid do have the largest eyes of any animal) but to make it strictly accurate you'd need to change "squid" to "giant squid", "have" to "can have", and "bicycle tire" to "child's bicycle tire".
Ah, the second definition isn't one I've ever seen used? A factoid may be used inappropriately to support an unrelated argument, ("the last pirates were seen in the 1800s, right as climate change started") but they're still _true_.
That's actually the original meaning. "Factoids... that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority."
The meaning has since mutated, and of course there's no reason we should be constrained to the original.
It's the original and etymologically, it makes more sense, since "-oid" means "resembling." "Humanoids" are not human, for instance. But of course appeals to etymology are not a good way to determine what a word means.
Some dictionaries order senses by age and others by usage (which may be somehow measured or may just be up to the instincts of the editors), so this isn't a useful metric without knowing the standard of the dictionary we are talking about.
We have issues with people dredging sand in Memphis on our Wolf river. Awful stuff. The philanthropic community has been working on buying up most of the land next through a conservancy.
Memphis is built on a thin layer of clay on top of sand. Which is actually great, we have one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the country under us. The only problem, we don't know all the locations that the aquifer gets refilled. :(
Sand provides a huge amount of surface area for colonies of bacteria responsible for converting ammonia into nitrites and nitrites into nitrates, which can then be taken up by plants or algae and converted into other chemicals that are less harmful to aquatic species.
Dredging sand from rivers and beaches is likely going to be seen as a massive ecological disaster in the next couple of decades.