For The First Time, A Giant 20″ Red Leech Was Filmed Slurping Down A Blue Earthworm Which Was 27″

Diving with a Great White: Not so frightening after all

The blood vessels on your head.

The dancers of the sea | Peter Chadwick

So I am not the only one who is still bitter about the Norwegian calf?

Absolutely not. I was anti when baby Norway showed up and as far as I can recall only one other anti actually had the common sense and compassion to actually publicly want that calf rescued. It honestly was the most emotional, frustrating time I had ever had in the captivity debate, and it was absolutely the last straw I could take from the anticaptivity movement, so ultimately that was one of the several pushes I had towards becoming a procap.

For those who missed it, some highlights of Baby Norway’s short life include;

- Orca “experts” / “researchers” flat-out saying that they would not allow the whale to be rescued – “Indeed, put this orca in a tank/aquarium is not even an option!! Norway does not want to see “Morgan’s case” happening again!“

- Morgan, who entered into captivity an absolute skeleton and looked like a neonate at two years old, and is now a beautiful, vibrant, healthy adult female. They don’t want… that to happen again. Okay. Speaks volumes of the anticaptivity agenda, because what did happen with baby Norway, is that she stranded, barely alive after a prolonged period of starvation, and got a round of bullets in her head (exactly like another Norwegian calf that stranded a year before her).

- They completely ignored this fragile starving, injured, INFANT CALF. Oh, but they “talked about a plan” so that’s fine.

- The infant (Let me stress that. This was a neonate calf, days old at best.), visibly starving already when it was first seen, should have at the VERY least been secluded into a small pen and started on a nutritious formula. Instead, they tossed it fish. And I directly quote, “Its body needs milk of course, but at least some calories!”. The optimism is disgusting, considering what this calf was going through, on its own, without help.

- Baby Norway went missing for a while – it wasn’t known if she “found her family” like activists had been hoping, simply wandered off, or if she died. But she showed back up. This time she stranded and she was barely alive. She was given a lethal injection via her dorsal (the only warm place left on her body that had entirely gone cold) and then shot in the head with a shot gun, “just in case”. And that was it.

Baby Norway vocalizing underwater.

Baby Norway’s last moments.

Rest in peace, beautiful little girl.

Microfilter allows non-invasive diagnosis of fetal abnormalities

A new method could allow physicians to diagnose fetal genetic abnormalities during pregnancy without the risks involved in current techniques.

A team of scientists at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Institute of Microelectronics (IME) has fabricated a microchip that can filter fetal red blood cells from the mother’s circulation. Retrieving these isolated fetal cells could allow the early diagnosis of fetal genetic abnormalities.

The technique, which would require drawing only a few millilitres of blood from an expecting mother, could be used from the eighth week of pregnancy; earlier than current prenatal diagnostic procedures.

Photograph of a pregnant uterus (womb) from a New Forest pony, approximately five months into the pregnancy. The developing pony (fetus) is outside the uterus but remains attached by its membranes and umbilical cord. The bent back legs of the fetus are sticking out from the membranes (top right-hand side). The uterus has been cut open to reveal its vast blood supply, which is visible on the inner surface. This historical specimen is from a cull animal that happened to be pregnant at the time. It is preserved in formalin in a Perspex container and was photographed in the Anatomy Museum of the Royal Veterinary College in London. (Credit: Michael Frank, Royal Veterinary College / Wellcome Images)

Snowshoe hares’ traditional habitat in Wisconsin may not be white enough to provide the animals with cover as the climate changes.

“The snowshoe hare is perfectly modeled for life on snow,” said Jonathan Pauli, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a coauthor of a study recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, in a release. “They’re adapted to glide on top of the snow and to blend in with the historical colors of the landscape.”

The snow is vital for snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus), who rely on it for camouflage from predators. But snow is becoming less common in the southern range of their habitat in Wisconsin…

photo by Gordon E. Robertson

Mildred Dresselhaus, the Queen of Carbon, Dies at 86

Dr. Dresselhaus, who helped transform carbon into the superstar of modern materials science, was renowned for her efforts to promote the cause of women in science.

Mildred Dresselhaus, a professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research into the fundamental properties of carbon helped transform it into the superstar of modern materials science and the nanotechnology industry, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass. She was 86.

Her death, at Mount Auburn Hospital, was confirmed by her granddaughter Leora Cooper. No cause was given.

Nicknamed the Queen of Carbon in scientific circles, Dr. Dresselhaus was renowned for her efforts to promote the cause of women in science. She was the first woman to secure a full professorship at M.I.T., in 1968, and she worked vigorously to ensure that she would not be the last.

In 1971, she and a colleague organized the first Women’s Forum at M.I.T. to explore the roles of women in science. Two years later she won a Carnegie Foundation grant to further that cause.

“I met Millie on my interview for a faculty job in 1984,” said Lorna Gibson, now a professor of materials science and engineering. “M.I.T. was quite intimidating then for a new female, but Millie made it all seem possible, even effortless. I knew it wouldn’t be, but she was such an approachable intellectual powerhouse, she made it seem that way.”

[…]

Dr. Dresselhaus used resonant magnetic fields and lasers to map out the electronic energy structure of carbon. She investigated the traits that emerge when carbon is interwoven with other materials: Stitch in some alkali metals, for example, and carbon can become a superconductor, in which an electric current meets virtually no resistance.

Dr. Dresselhaus was a pioneer in research on fullerenes, also called buckyballs: soccer-ball-shaped cages of carbon atoms that can be used as drug delivery devices, lubricants, filters and catalysts.

She conceived the idea of rolling a single-layer sheet of carbon atoms into a hollow tube, a notion eventually realized as the nanotube — a versatile structure with the strength of steel but just one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair.

She worked on carbon ribbons, semiconductors, nonplanar monolayers of molybdenum sulfide, and the scattering and vibrational effects of tiny particles introduced into ultrathin wires.

She published more than 1,700 scientific papers, co-wrote eight books and gathered a stack of accolades as fat as a nanotube is fine.

Dr. Dresselhaus was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President Barack Obama), the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Enrico Fermi prize and dozens of honorary doctorates. She also served as president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and worked in the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration.

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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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Taphonomy