It's Sometimes Rocket Science

Florida Scrub Jay, California Scrub Jay, Woodhouse's Scrub Jay

Mexican Jay, Black-billed Magpie, Dwarf Jay

Sri Lankan Blue Magpie, Eurasian Jay, Taiwan Magpie

Unicolored Jay, Black-throated Magpie Jay, Turquoise Jay

Beautiful Jay, Azure-hooded Jay, Black-throated Jay

sea butterflies, Limacina helicina (Gastropoda: Limacinidae)

Deep below the ocean’s surface, just off the Central California coast, thousands of pearl octopus (Muusoctopus robustus) gather near an extinct underwater volcano. MBARI and a team of collaborators used high-tech tools to monitor the Octopus Garden and learn exactly why this site is so attractive to these animals. After three years of study, researchers confirmed that Muusoctopus gather at the Octopus Garden to mate and nest in cracks and crevices bathed by deep-sea thermal springs.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

RATING: RELIABLE

Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.

Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’

They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.

Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’

They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.

Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’

The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.

Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.

“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’

The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.

It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.

Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’

Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.

Researchers have genetically engineered a marine microorganism to break down plastic in salt water. Specifically, the modified organism can break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a plastic used in everything from water bottles to clothing that is a significant contributor to microplastic pollution in oceans. "This is exciting because we need to address plastic pollution in marine environments," says Nathan Crook, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. "One option is to pull the plastic out of the water and put it in a landfill, but that poses challenges of its own. It would be better if we could break these plastics down into products that can be re-used. For that to work, you need an inexpensive way to break the plastic down. Our work here is a big step in that direction." To address this challenge, the researchers worked with two species of bacteria. The first bacterium, Vibrio natriegens, thrives in saltwater and is remarkable—in part—because it reproduces very quickly. The second bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis, is remarkable because it produces enzymes that allow it to break down PET and eat it.

Wild boars in southeastern Germany are known to contain high levels of radioactive cesium, which has been widely attributed to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. But radioactivity levels have decreased in other animals while mysteriously persisting in the boars – a peculiar behavior known as the "wild boar paradox". New research shows nuclear weapons tests from the mid-20th century are also responsible, and scientists say both sources continue to contaminate the boars via their diet. The stockily built, tusked wild boars (Sus scrofa) appear healthy, but the dangerously high levels of radioactive cesium found in some of them have reduced hunting of the animals for their meat and contributed to overpopulation issues.

so the thing about tumbleweeds is they are in fact incredibly invasive. they cause millions of dollars of damage every year, and create serious traffic accidents and agricultural disruption. (they're also highly flammable, because of course they are.) the town in question was piled so deep, residents had to call 911 after being trapped in their homes. bulldozers and emergency workers had to be brought. it was wild.

tumbleweeds are also heavier than they look--they're made of wood after all. and they're big (most varieties top out at 4 feet, but there are larger ones that can reach up to 6 feet across. you know how the Emu War sounds absurd and fictional until you realize emus are 6 solid feet of clawed, beaked, avian dinosauric FUCK YOU? yeah, this is like that

in summary, tumbleweeds are thorny, pollen-filled, fire-spreading assholes (and they can spread radiation from old nuclear sites), which means we are dealing roaming packs of stabby, poisonous, radioactive fireballs of death that can appear out of nowhere coming at you top speed down the middle of the highway!

is it as evil as all its cousins? probably! do i care? that just makes it sexier! and the bulbs contain hallucinogenic properties, which makes perfect sense from a single glance:

"Insects are Crustaceans" (Pancrustacea)

"Dolphins are Hoofed Mammals" (Artiodactyl)

"Mushrooms are closer to Animals than they are to Plants" (Opisthokont)

"Hyenas are Cat-like" (Feliformia)

"Herpetology is a LYING BASTARD since Amphibians are equally close to Mammals and Reptiles, and there's no reason it should be included like that. if anything, Herpetology should be a parent science of Ornithology, since birds are reptiles. why the fuck are toads here??" (Amniota, Sauria)

termites are cockroaches

ants are wasps

bees are wasps

butterflies are moths

ticks are mites

fleas are scorpionflies? this one's weird

horseshoe crabs are almost definitely arachnids

Crocodiles are fake-crocodiles (pseudosuchia)

False gharials are gharials

Pandas are carnivores that only eat plants

Protists aren’t a real thing and all those eukaryotes that aren’t plants, fungi, or animals are actually really complicated and diverse

Animal taxonomy is a mess and Protostomia and Deuterostomia as they are might not be a real thing

All bilaterans are worms. Some are just super weird worms.

Pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs. You can technically call them (stem)birds, but they aren’t dinosaurs.

Dimetrodon is closer to mammals (it’s a stem mammal) than to dinosaurs.

Everything in Avemetatarsalia (Pan-Birds) can be called a bird. This includes all pterosaurs and all dinosaurs. And all dinosaurs were very, very bird like - more so than pterosaurs.

Dolphins and porpoises are whales which are hoofed mammals and closer to ruminants than to rhinos

Elephants are far removed from literally all hoofed mammals

Hoofed mammals are closest to carnívorans

Tuatara isn’t a lizard

Humans are Apes which are Monkeys

Birds evolved from reptiles and thus are reptiles

But mammals did not evolve from reptiles

Neither reptiles nor mammals (aka Amniotes) evolved from (liss)Amphibians

But all Tetrapods (Amphibians + Amniotes) evolved from Sarcopterygii and thus are Sarcopterygiians

sea stars are technically bilateral animals, their larvae look like this:

I refer, of course, to the time Buzz Aldrin (age 72 at the time) cold-cocked a moon landing conspiracy theorist straight in his smug face after being accused of being a coward, liar, and thief.

Yes, someone was indeed dumb enough to tell a man so unafraid of death that he was willing to go into the void on a fragile explosive rocket, a coward.

Said dumbass was filming this confrontation as some sort of proof of moon fraud, but has instead captured this glorious moment of near-cosmic justice for us to loop for all time.