Ebola Zaire
The Hot Zone
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2013-03-29
Source: torace
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2013-03-28
Two blue jays are harassing the Cooper’s hawk that sometimes hangs around the backyard. And he/ she is just sitting there and taking it.
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2013-03-27
19-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.
(via proofmathisbeautiful)
Source: inhabitat.com
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2013-03-17
Source: io9.com
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2013-02-19
Science: It’s What’s Real™
GUYS
THERE ARE ONLY 35 NOTES ON THIS
they printed stem cells with a 3D printer
they printed stem cells with a 3D printer
THEY PRINTED STEM CELLS WITH A 3D PRINTER
THEY PRINTED STEM CELLS WITH A 3D PRINTER
THEY PRINTED STEM CELLS WITH A 3D MOTHERFUCKING PRINTER
DO YOU SHITHEADS GET HOW BIG A FUCKING DEAL THIS IS?!
DO YOU THINK THIS IS A FUCKING GAME?!?!?!
also cool goldfucking stem cells holy shiiiit
fuck the stem cells THERE ARE BIONIC EYEBALLS
No but
alchemic bacteria
alchemic fucking bacteria
alchemicrobes
fucking alchemist microbes
(via allthempreg)
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2013-02-10
Oh my god look at this beauty. It’s a fucking purple and gold spider.
Purple and gold spider.
Source: Reddit.comthis source is useless to me
I want to know more about this little treasure
ID??
I know it’s from Thailand because the site it led me to was in Thai, along with another picture.
It’s a jumping spider, I know that much.
Fucking ridiculous, this is a beautiful creature. Shame on anyone who says spiders are ugly.
(via strude-heartlines)
Source: lexreon
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2013-02-03
Evolution Simplified
This photoset should be required reading for every citizen.
FINALLY
One of the things I find to be a common misunderstanding is that people think “Adapt to survive” means life forms mutate in ways to suit their environment, when it’s really more like mutations happen and the life form adapts to accommodate it. If they find a more efficient way to live with the mutation or it allows them to spread and flourish in previously uninhabitable territory, it kicks of a process of divergent evolution. If the mutation is too harmful and impedes them too heavily before they can adapt to it, it dies out.
Mutated life forms are often reproductively unappealing to the original population! But in nature some amount of inbreeding is fairly common, and a mutation that might be recessive will become more common in an isolated population. With divergent evolution you often see a population split into groups that change until they do not wish to mate with each other and continue to change until the cannot viably mate with each other. And by then they’re different species. Like with birds, often a group of song birds will not be friendly towards song birds that sing a different tune, even if they’re the same species. One flock of birds gets separated and after a while they begin to sing slightly different songs. the two flocks will no longer socialize with each other, any genetic quirks unique to either of the two flocks will remain within that flock. Over a few generations one flock may have ended up with bigger beaks and the other flock may have longer legs, the standards for a desirable mate in each flock will have changed.
That’s also an oversimplification of the process, but you know, I feel like I see a lot of creationists get hung up on the idea that an animal would be like “it’s cold here, better evolve some blubber into my kids”, when it’s really more like “oh no I ended up with this weird blubber gene, well I guess at least it means I can hunt in colder territory and get food no one else can”
This is all pretty cool, and I’m just going to add in:
Dogs evolved (well, were domesticated, but that’s really just evolving where “human convenience” is the relevant selection pressure) from wolves, and yet wolves still exist. Jawed fish evolved from jawless fish, and yet lampreys and hagfish still exist. Multicellular life evolved from unicellular life, and yet microbes still exist.
It’s not like Pokemon. A whole species doesn’t just “level up” simultaneously.
So even if the ancestral species humans evolved from was still around, it wouldn’t disprove evolution.
Source: blaze-ferrari
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2013-01-24
Clouds Harbor Microbial Life
The storm clouds in Earth’s atmosphere are filled with microbial life, according to a new study.
The research, published today (Jan. 23) in the journal PLoS One, revealed that hailstones drawn from storm clouds harbor several species of bacteria that tend to reside on plants, as well as thousands of organic compounds normally found in soil. Some of the bacterial species can seed the tiny ice crystals that lead to rain, suggesting they play a role in causing rain.
“Those storm clouds are quite violent phenomena,” said study co-author Tina Santl Temkiv, an environmental chemist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “They are sucking huge amounts of air from under the clouds, and that’s how the bacteria probably got into the cloud.”
The researchers think the bacteria come from the air hovering just above Earth that gets swept into the storm clouds through updrafts. That would suggest the atmosphere is a thread that can connect distant ecosystems, and that certain bacteria may be better at colonizing faraway environments, Pierre Amato, a researcher at France’s Blaise Pascal University who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.
“Clouds can be thought of as transient ecosystems selecting for certain [types of bacteria] that are better fitted than others, and that can thus quickly disperse over the globe,” Amato said. “Understanding how microbes disperse is relevant, of course, for epidemiology, and also for microbial ecology.”
Source: livescience.com.
(via connesso)
Source: livescience.com
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2013-01-22
Source: did-you-kno
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2013-01-12
Every time I see these I’m like “How are these even real?!?”
bottom center :)c
Babies.
(via karcricket)
Source: National Geographic
