I’d Like To Introduce You To….

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.

Follow @the-future-now​

BILL BILL BILL BILL

me, on a date: so what's your opinion on sharks?

them: oh my god they are such cold, heartless MONSTERS and-

me, shoving breadsticks in my purse: sorry but i have to go home, right now, immediately.

The Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, is a member of the “sleeper shark” family. It moves very slowly around the deep ocean.

They grow to enormous sizes – in some cases more than 5 metres (16 feet) long – and live in very cold waters in the far north Atlantic, sometimes at the surface but often as deep as 1,800 metres (1.1 miles). They cruise along at 0.74 metres per second, or about three-quarters of a mile an hour.

It was already known that they can live for more than 200 years, but new research has shown that is literally only half the story.

When the oldest shark researchers studied was born (the Greenland shark gives birth to live young, not eggs), the Pilgrims had only recently settled in Massachusetts. Europe’s Thirty-Year War was in its infancy. James I sat on the throne of England. It lived through the English Civil War, the Great Plague and Fire of London, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, both world wars, and the entire nine-season run of Seinfeld.

Continue reading.

Octopus rubescens 

San Mateo county CA June 2015 / FZ-200 /

 hd button recommended

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.

DON’T GO IN THE WATER: NEW EVIDENCE THAT SOME DINOSAURS WERE STRONG SWIMMERS

Claw marks left on a river bottom in Sichuan, China are evidence for dinosaurs’ ability to swim relatively long distances. According to an international team of scientists in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin, theropod species of dinosaurs were able to travel in relatively deep bodies of water.

Keep reading

Bacteria use their own pumps to collect magnesium

Researchers at UiO and NCMM have discovered that the system used by bacteria to transport magnesium is so sensitive that it can detect a pinch of magnesium salt in a swimming pool.

Researchers at NCMM, the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway at UiO and Oslo University Hospital have shown exactly how sensitive the bacteria’s transport system is.

Researcher Jens Preben Morth tells us ‘We have identified a nano-sized magnesium pump.’

The researchers manipulated an E. coli bacterium so that it overproduced using its own magnesium pump. 'The pump was isolated in the bacterium’s cell membrane.’ There are different methods of achieving this type of isolation. We could either divide up the proteins according to size, or we could examine the positive or negative electric charges of the proteins on the surface of the pump. 'As soon as the pump was isolated, we were able to work with the pure protein without disruption from other proteins,’ Morth explains. With the aid of enzyme kinetics, a special method of analysing chemical reactions, the researchers were able to obtain a calculation of the sensitivity to magnesium.

Saranya Subramani, Harmonie Perdreau-Dahl, Jens Preben Morth. The magnesium transporter A is activated by cardiolipin and is highly sensitive to free magnesium in vitro. eLife, 2016; 5 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.11407

The bacteria are shown in green. The multi-coloured area shows how the pump rests on the bacterial membrane (pink). The ‘machine’ itself inside the membrane is shown in orange. The grey dots are magnesium atoms. Credit: Jens Preben Morth, UiO

How do you feel about Velvet Worms?

i LOVE velvet worms alright they look like someone had a bunch of caterpillars and snakes lying around, just overflowing all over the place and thought HOW am i gonna make these take up less space wait lets just Smash Em Together

so velvet worms ! not actually worms at all, but their own separate phylum related to tardigrades, and they tend to stay pretty small, with the longest ones getting maybe 8 inches or so

the Official name for em is onychophora, which means “claw bearer” and makes a lot more sense when you find out that at the end of all those little stubs ( called lobopods ! ) is a pair of tiny retractable claws

theyre ALSO notable for birthing live young, breathing through their skin, AND for spraying long thin streams of mucus from almost a foot away at anything that bothers them through slime glands located under their skin

the mucus isnt just for defense though ! velvet worms are actually predatory animals, and the the slime is used a lot in hunting - when sprayed, it crosses over the unfortunate bug like a sticky net, quickly hardening into tiny death traps that the velvet worm can then consume at its own leisure 

while generally solitary, they also sometimes form little social communities with other velvet worms, with groups inhabiting rotting logs, doing things like hunting together and defending their nest from outsider worms

they dont seem super intimidating mainly because we’re not a half an inch tall

but to a cricket, this is the face of Terror

x x x x x