Massive underground reserves of water found in Africa
Huge reserves of underground water in some of the driest parts of Africa could provide a buffer against the effects of climate change for years to come, scientists said.
Researchers from the British Geological Survey and University College London have for the first time mapped the aquifers, or groundwater, across the continent and the amount they hold.
‘The largest groundwater volumes are found in the large sedimentary aquifers in the North African countries Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan,’ the scientists said in their paper.
They estimate that reserves of groundwater across the continent are 100 times the amount found on its surface, or 0.66 million cubic kilometres.
» via Daily Mail
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you poured 90,000 liters of hot supersaturated copper sulphate solution into an apartment and sealed it off and waited…
Roger Hiorns, Seizure. 2009.
The Secret Life of Plankton
A new video from TEDEducation about the beautiful, mysterious food web at the smallest scales of marine life. This is like stepping onto an alien world! All life on Earth depends in some way on these varied, microscopic wonders. A few tablespoons of seawater holds more marine life than there are people on Earth.
There is grandeur in this tiny view of life. Prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor, and then smile.
Mystery fossil has scientists stumped
Paleontologist David Meyer, left and Carlton Brett, right, flank Ron Fine, who discovered the large fossil spread out on the table. Credit: University of CincinnatiAn amateur paleontologist from Ohio has found a very large and very mysterious fossil in Kentucky that professional scientists say has them puzzled.
The fossilized mysterious organism, roughly elliptical in shape with multiple lobes and almost 7 feet in length, was discovered near Covington, Ky., by Ron Fine of Dayton, a member of the Dry Dredgers, an association of amateur paleontologists based at the University of Cincinnati.
The club, celebrating its 70th anniversary this month, has a long history of collaborating with academic paleontologists, a university release said Tuesday.
“I knew right away that I had found an unusual fossil,” Fine said. “Imagine a saguaro cactus with flattened branches and horizontal stripes in place of the usual vertical stripes. That’s the best description I can give.”
The fossil reminded him of streamlined shapes seen in coral, sponges and seaweed as a result of growing in currents of water, he said.
The find has professional paleontologists scratching their heads.
“It’s definitely a new discovery,” David L. Meyer of the University of Cincinnati geology department said. “And we’re sure it’s biological. We just don’t know yet exactly what it is.”
The mystery monster seems to defy all known groups of organisms, Fine said, and leave people with more questions than answers.
See, guys, you don’t have to be a professional scientist to discover new, important, and amazing things! Most people assume you must have degrees to go on digs, but that is not the case. Now, that doesn’t mean you should go out in the world without being a bit educated. Self-education is fine! Study, join societies, go to classes and lectures if you can. There’s a lot you should learn before getting your hands dirty *rimshot*, but look at this amateur who has discovered something new! Definitely an interesting find, and I can’t wait to see what papers get published.
(via project-argus)
(Source: lifescomedy)
So, in case you did not see, the shuttle Discovery went to Washington DC, and NASA took videos of it. This is the video of them removing the shuttle from the special plane designed to carry the shuttles. All credit goes to NASA
I can’t stop reblogging items about this. so amazing
Nice that the old war horse got a few last rides in, and a very cool coming out party for the space shuttle Discovery in DC last week. Call us geeks if you will, but any vehicle is inherently cooler if it’s been in space.
UCSD Physicist Uses Math to Beat Traffic Ticket
A physicist at the Univeristy of California San Diego used his knowledge of measuring bodies in motion to show in court why he couldn’t be guilty of a ticket for failing to halt at a stop sign. The argument, a four-page paper delving into the differences between angular and linear motion, got the physicist out of a $400 ticket.
Happy birthday to Albert Einstein! He would have been 133 today.
(Source: berkeleydiaries)
The Case of the Phantom Phantom Finger
A fascinating read about a “psuedo-phantom” finger!
neuroticthought:
by
A “phantom limb” is the sensation that an amputated limb (or other body part) is still present.
They can be distressing, especially when they’re accompanied by pain in the “limb” which is not uncommon. The leading theory of why they happen is that the brain areas that used to receive sensations from the lost appendage respond to input “spilling over” from nearby brain regions.
Anyway, a phantom limb is bad enough, but a paper just out reports on the case of a phantom finger that was never there in the first place.
A woman, RN, was born with an abnormally short right arm; her right hand was also malformed, with a shortened thumb, no index finger, and immobile ring and middle fingers. Only the little finger was present and correct.
At the age of 18, she then had the misfortune to suffer a car crash; the injuries meant that her right hand had to be amputated. She soon found herself experiencing a phantom hand - with all five fingers. Three of them felt like they were normal length; the “thumb” and “index finger” felt shorter than normal, but remember that the original hand had no index finger at all.
RN also suffered from phantom pains and was distressed by the fact that the “hand” felt like it was bent into an impossible posture. Fortunately, the mirror box technique was able to set things right; while the phantom was still there, it was no longer painful, and all the fingers were the right length.
This is a remarkable case. The authors of the paper, Paul McGeoch and V. S. Ramachandran (perhaps the best known phantom-limb expert) say that it could mean that we’re born with an innate, hard-wired “body plan” in the brain, regardless of the way our body actually develops -While RN’s phocomelic[abnormal] hand was present she did not experience any phantom sensations. Thus, although severely deformed, the mere presence of the hand was sufficient to inhibit the innate representation of her normal hand and prevent any phantom sensations from emerging, presumably from tactile, proprioceptive and visual feedback… the amputation of her hand appears to have disinhibited these suppressed finger representations in her sensory cortex and allowed the emergence of phantom fingers that had never existed in her actual hand.They do consider alternative explanations though -
Clearly it is beholden on us to consider whether RN’s descriptions do not describe a genuine sensory experience, but rather are confabulatory in origin. We do not believe this to be the case, since if she were confabulating then it would seem unlikely that she should report that her phantom hand had five fingers, but that they were not all of normal length; if this were simply ‘wishful thinking’ then she would likely claim to have five normal length fingers. This appears a persuasive, although not definitive argument, against confabulation.Seems like a fair assessment.
I don’t even know what you’d call the phantom “index finger”. A pseudo-phantom? A phantom phantom?
Exploring inside cells in 3D with electron microscope tomogram
Students at St. Olaf college took slices of Tetrahymena cells during mating and assembled them into a 3-D model of cytoskeletal structure. It shows the inner membranes of the connected cells (green) and the fibers that provide skeletal structure (red) involved in the mating process of the protozoan.
It’s a lot more complicated in there than textbooks make it look, and also more beautiful.
Previously: Cancer killing cells captured in 3-D, and a beautiful composite 3-D image of a (crowded) mammalian cell.
Agatized dinosaur bone cells from the Morrison Formation in Utah (42x)
Photo Credit: University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA,
Technique: Stereomicrosopy
