The Smoky Pink Core Of The Omega Nebula

Your sunscreen is contributing to the decline of coral reefs

A new report has found that a common sunscreen ingredient is actually toxic to coral, and is killing off juvenile coral and severely damaging adult coral in high concentrations around the world, particularly in Hawaii and the Caribbean.

The ingredient in question? A UV-filtering chemical compound called oxybenzone - also known as BP-3 or Benzophenone-3 - which is found in 3,500 brands of sunscreen around the world, including L’Oreal Paris, Banana Boat, and Neutrogena.

 - ScienceAlert

Photos of orcas underwater near Bremer Canyon, Australia.

Manatee

Green burial practices could help the environment

Traditional caskets are hundreds of pounds of wood, metal and whatever cushioning goes inside.. Burial vaults, the enclosures that barricade each casket from the elements, can be around 3,000 pounds of cement, sometimes steel. One gallon of toxic embalming fluid  is used per 50 pounds of body. Add it all up and you’ve got around two tons of material per body chilling in the earth forever.

Despite the downsides of burial, not everyone wants to be cremated. Plus, there’s plenty of evidence suggesting the energy it takes to burn a body down wreaks significant damage on the environment.

Green burial could be the solution. The idea is to make as little an impact on the natural environment of the burial site as possible.

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protect these precious sea children

For the first time, a giant 20″ red leech was filmed slurping down a blue earthworm which was 27″ in length. The footage was captured by BBC filmmakers for the series ‘Wonders of the Monsoon.’

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Orangutan learns to mimic human conversation for the first time

‘Rocky’ the ginger ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words, a feat that might help us study the evolutionary origins of human speech

An orangutan has shown an ability to emulate human speech for the first time — a feat that gets us closer to understanding how human speech first evolved from the communications of ancestral great apes.

‘Rocky’ the ginger ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a “conversational context”.

“This opens up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans,” says lead researcher Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, UK.

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What’s Next for the World’s Most Trafficked Mammal?

Earlier this week, a U.S. agency announced that it will consider giving greater protection to pangolins.

What’s a pangolin, you might ask?

Pangolins are creatures found in Asia and Africa that have a pinecone-esque appearance. They’re about the size of house cats, are covered in scales, and have very long tongues for slurping up ants and termites.

These pest controllers are a hot commodity on the black market, poached for nearly all their body parts. Their meat is considered a delicacy in Asia. Their scales, made of keratin (the main ingredient in fingernails), are fashioned into jewelry or used as traditional medicine, even though they don’t have any curative value. Even their blood, a supposed aphrodisiac, is dried and used in potions.

Considered the most trafficked mammals in the world, tens of thousands of pangolins are believed to be poached annually—bad news for an animal whose females reproduce only once a year.

That’s why in July 2015, conservation groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list seven pangolin species under the Endangered Species Act, a law that seeks to conserve endangered or threatened species throughout their range (an eighth species, the Temnick’s ground pangolin, found in southern and eastern Africa, is already protected under the act).

And on March 15, the agency said the organizations made a good enough case that it’s now  willing to invite the public to weigh in on the proposal for 60 days.

No one knows exactly how many pangolins remain in the wild, but researchers are pretty sure the animals’ numbers are shrinking. Two of the four Asian species, the Sunda and the Chinese pangolins, are considered to face a high risk of extinction and the other two are “endangered,” according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which sets the conservation status of wildlife. With the depletion of the Asian pangolins, smugglers have targeted their cousins in Africa, which are faring better but are nonetheless described as “vulnerable.”

U.S. Involvement

If the seven species gain protection under the U.S. law, it would be illegal for people to import the animals or their parts into the country—unless they’re being brought in to promote conservation. Same thing for sales across state lines. 

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