Dead

I planted some saguaro seeds about a week ago. Who woukda thunk that such large lads start out so smol. (submitted @nolayelde)

this speaks for itself when paired with a pic of the grown plant for scale:

they usually live to be 150+ years old. cutting one down in Arizona, where they’re native, is a felony with a maximum 9 months in prison. 

in my brief wikipedia exploration to find out how old they could be for this ask i found out that there was a dude in 1982 who was vandalizing one (which is also highly illegal) by shooting at it and then poking at it, and not only did the 500 pound arm of the cactus he was shooting at fall on top of him, but the actual trunk of the cactus then also proceeded to fall on him. he died. smited by the cactus gods for his transgressions 

From Twitter.

nsfw (not safe for water)

alkali metals

Not cool guys

The Oceans Are A Melting Pot Of Microbes

https://sciencespies.com/news/the-oceans-are-a-melting-pot-of-microbes/

The Oceans Are A Melting Pot Of Microbes

Diatoms are photosynthesising algae, they have a siliceous skeleton (frustule) and are found in … [+] almost every aquatic environment including fresh and marine waters, soils, in fact almost anywhere moist.

Getty

Within every drop of seawater lives a mixture of teeny-tiny organisms, like bacteria and viruses, collectively known as ‘microbes’.

According to new research published in Cell by scientists at Maine’s Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, the degree of microbial diversity within the ocean is perhaps more staggering than originally thought. In the largest study ever conducted on individual cells, over 12,000 microbial genomes were analyzed to build a massive database, dubbed the Global Ocean Reference Genomes Tropics (GORG-Tropics).

The samples were collected from the tropics and subtropics, representing about two-thirds of the world’s ocean. To the researcher’s surprise, every one of the 12,000 cells they analyzed had a unique genome – no two cells were identical. What’s more, most of the microbes were so dissimilar from all the other microbes analyzed that they were considered to be different species altogether.

A summary of the new study published in Cell by researchers from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean … [+] Sciences.

Pachiadaki et al., Cell

The researchers also analyzed the microbial diversity within a single teaspoon of water from the Sargasso Sea. An astonishing 6,000 cells were captured, analyzed, and added to the growing database.

Of all the genes discovered within the Sargasso Sea sample, at least one-fifth were genes also found in the tropics and subtropics. According to these microbial experts, these large portion of shared genes between the Sargasso Sea and the tropics despite immense microbial diversity indicates how effective ocean currents are at mixing microbial life around the globe.

“In the same way that we think of New York City as a melting pot, every teaspoon of the ocean is a microbial melting pot,” said Ramunas Stepanauskas, Senior Research Scientist at Bigelow. “The ocean is huge, and it’s amazing how complex ecological and evolutionary processes take place in each tiny drop.”

Map of the Sargasso Sea.

Staysail, Dreamstime.com

With the help of cutting-edge genome analysis technology, this study sequenced more microbes than all studies prior to 2013, combined. With an abundance of information, new discoveries have followed. For example, Stepanauskas’ team discovered a group of bacteria, known as proteobacteria, previously not known to have photosynthetic, or light harnessing, capabilities.

“Genetic information can teach us a lot about ecology, and these may be photosynthetic organisms that were unnoticed before,” said Maria Pachiadaki, a former Bigelow Laboratory postdoctoral researcher and lead author of this study. “If experiments confirm what the genes suggest, this is an important microbial group to consider in ocean carbon studies.”

With less than 1% of marine microorganisms proving possible to grow and study in a laboratory setting, databases like GORG-Tropics are essential for advancing our understanding of microbial capabilities.

Senior Research Scientist Ramunas Stepanauskas holds a sample of Sargasso Sea water before analysis … [+] in Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences’ Single Cell Genomics Center.

Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

In collaboration with researchers at the University of California San Diego, this research team also identified microbes that could fuel novel biotechnology applications. By tracking which microbes are able to produce certain chemicals, the GORG-Tropics database may help fast-track future discoveries of new antibiotics or cancer-fighting medicines.

With a database of this size, the potential for discovery continues. Stepanauskas and his team of researchers will continue to search for more discoveries to further reveal the hidden microbial diversity of the ocean, and in turn, the intricacies of how the ocean functions.

“One of our main goals with the GORG initiative was to produce a powerful resource for the marine microbiology research community,” said Julia Brown, a bioinformatician at Bigelow Laboratory and a study author. “We hope that scientists will be able to use this dataset in follow-up studies to answer questions no one has even thought of yet.”

#News

Me: *dresses as stereotypically gay as possible*

Me: I hope another gay notices me

I like new friends!

Reblog if it's okay for anybody to message you if they're feeling lonely during self isolation. Let's get through this together!

Frog has message for you! (Click him)

Idaho Gothic

People keep pronouncing it Boy-ZEE but every time you open your mouth to correct them you can’t speak, they keep chanting it while you clutch at your throat. It’s closing up faster.

Someone says that all there is out there are potato farms. You laugh but when you turn around you’re stranded in a field filled with potatoes and when you turn back around, the person is gone. There’s only potatoes.

You’re driving through a desert, an empty road ahead of you. Your eyes drift shut and when you open them you’re in the mountains, jagged peaks soaring above you and a hawk shrieks overhead. You swerve and you’re suddenly in the rolling plains. You blink again and you’re back in the desert. There’s no way to get off the highway.

You and your friends go down to float the river and you can hear their laughter just around the bend. You can’t catch up to them and the bend just keeps getting further away.

You’re stuck coming down from the mountains, waiting for cows to cross. You can’t see the end of the line of them, they just keep coming.

You’re at a Boise State football game. The turf is a dizzying, bright blue in the sunlight. It looks like it’s getting bigger, until you realize it’s slowly swallowing up the stadium. You realize it’s somehow 2010. It’s the Fiesta Bowl all over again and Coach Peterson smiles up at you with too many teeth. You’re falling in a pit of blue.

There’s a knock on your door. It’s smiling missionaries who don’t blink, they begin to talk in unison. You try to tell them you’re fine but it’s like they don’t see you. You shut the door quickly and you can hear them still talking. There’s a knock on your back door.

You thought Hells Canyon was just a name. But disappearances are multiplying and there’s a figure just past the ledge beckoning you closer.

“I’ll leave one day,” you say one year. “I’ll leave one day,” you say three years later. “I’ll leave one day,” you say —

Can I have a cursed giant creature fact?

sure! at lengths of over 55 feet and weights of 600 pounds, our friend the Oarfish surely qualifies :)

we don’t know a whole lot about the world’s longest bony fish, aside from that it rarely comes to the surface and inspired most of the Sea Serpent legends floating around. they’re fairly rare and live only in the Abyssopelagic Zone, around 3,300 feet down. but this is old news to everyone who’s seen the info posts about these guys going around, so what’s so cursed about this? well, I’ll tell you! 

have you ever wondered what the Oarfish gets up to, way down there? we didn’t realize this until we started sending ROVs and submarines into the deep sea to observe live ones, but Oarfish are... a little nontraditional as fish go. 

see, they don’t normally swim horizontally all majestic-like like in the pictures up there, it turns out that instead they spend their time just kind of... hanging vertically in the water column. 

motionless, staring at the surface with all 50+ feet of them vanishing into the darkness below.

and I don’t know about you but frankly, I find that a little creepy.